A great followup to Rogue Legacy, despite still being in early access.

Although a bit light on the "metroidvania" genre, Rogue Legacy 2 is a metroidvania roguelite. The goal is simple, defeat all the bosses and then fight the final boss (many bosses and areas are not in the game yet).
Many roguelikes/lites save your progress after death, Rogue Legacy 2 does this, but also makes you choose a child from your lineage, which each have unique traits.

Fans of the original will likely be happy at how the class system is changed. Classes are now much more than just knight with slightly different stats, they now all play completely differently!

Content-wise, this game is still missing quite a bit, but as of right now (content update 1) the amount of content i'd say is about on par with the original game.

Update (7/2/2021): As of the 4th content update, this game now has way more content than the first! Its to the point where i've put another 15 hours into the game, and haven't gotten through area 2.
There's a lot. Like, seriously.
And yet, they still have more planned!

Much more gameplay variety than the first one.

Incomplete at the moment yet it still proves to be a good sequel to a decent game.

I will say that some of the rooms that can be generated can be just outright fucking corny. Don't dash through doorways or else your dash might persist just long enough to end directly over a pit of spikes, also don't just take your attention away from the game to look at your second monitor or anything while moving to a new room cause some enemies will ready up to attack you right when you enter a new room. It's either enemies attacking you right as you enter or you drop down into a room thats a dead end except theres a trap that'll hurt you if you don't get back out in 3 seconds or so.

Regardless of that gripe, it's a fine game

I haven't touched the original game since I was a stupid idiot kid who couldn't form coherent sentences. Now I can. Rogue Legacy 2 has really smooth movement, a plethora of unique weapons, and a lot of challenging boss fights. The areas are all unique and a lot of fun to explore. The scar challenges serve as additional challenge fights and some tutorials (I didn't know you could dash cancel the barbarian attacks until I did that scar). The music is good and cool. My only real issue with the game is the resolve system. I think losing health as a result of picking up an item is a cool idea, but the vast majority of the items don't really feel worth it for how little resolve you have especially at the start. Everything else is cool and fun and I'm looking forward to casually playing through multiple NG+ runs.

An improvement over the original in almost every way. My personal preference is the pixel/retro graphics from the first outing. The sequel has a cartoon quality which isn't as appealing.

The game can drag, so I eventually turned on House Rules around the NG+2 mark. This made the grind far more bearable and really improved my enjoyment.

Oh, and Valkyrie is the best.

i actually would say i really enjoy this game and i'd even say it's better than most roguelikes. unlike other roguelikes which cram you into this weird, eternal melting nightmare where the days repeat over and over and you're forced to confront yourself as you plow through sisyphean tasks and see the hours slowly drain from your life, rogue legacy 2 provides a slight remedy in the form of a stat-tree meaning that at the end of every run, you can put your money towards a specific trait and thus increase your chances of winning a run. other roguelikes will force you to play the same shit over and over until you git gud , but with rogue legacy 2 you're given a little speck of hope in the form of what might be an otherwise meaningless progression system that does in fact get you pretty addicted to the game. if it had not been for this progression system, i would've thrown the game out and never look at it again. i'm a simple guy, i see numbers go up and stats skyrocket and the little chemicals in my brain start dancing. it's the task of building up a huge collection of gold and then spending almost all of it on one stat and repeating it over and over. it's the closest thing to gambling!!! not only that but the competent combat system and enthralling art design made the experience a more palatable one compared to the likes of slay the spire which will flash its skirt with the same thirty amalgamations of burnt overly airbrushed Scary Monster Type 3B until you feel your grip on reality slip away. the screen will shake every time you drive your blade through some poor skeleton and it felt so fucking good. the vibrating controller did wonders.
the game tries to have a story and lore but anyone who plays a roguelike to be touched by a tightly woven epic full of romance and drama is insane. i admit that i skipped through all of it and i don't really think the creators were that pressed to tell it anyways because it'd be told through the form of diary entries dumped in random places and i laugh at the thought of someone, in the middle of their long run, sitting down to read the frenzied ramblings of some vague Figure Not To Be Named, Only To Be Theorized About who will drop little pieces of lore here and there and then vaguely refer to themselves to spice things up. the game is fun but for its worth, aka a gambling machine, i don't think it has much more value than that. it didn't move me. it wasn't a deeply arresting existentialist piece on the horrors of aging, although IMAGINE a roguelike like that!!!!! it was a good little timesink and it was way better than the first game goodbye!

A very easy game to slip into, whether it's a quick run at lunch time or a longer session with some TV on in the background. Minute to minute, it's fun, dashing and dodging and exploring the castle. Compared to the original, the new classes do a lot to shake it up, and I'm personally a big fan of the Boxer and the Astromancer. However, there are a lot of nagging issues, none of them big enough to be deal breakers, but in aggregate make the game just, underwhelming.

Take upgrades, for instance. Like the first game, the rogue-lite loop is that you do a run through the castle, looting and pillaging, and when you inevitably die, you get to spend all the money you earned upgrading your castle to give permanent bonuses to your future runs. The castle is a gigantic, bloated mess, with THREE seperate upgrade rooms, each with their own independent level for every stat. And you can unlock additional levels. For all of them! It seems aimed at a hardcore crowd ready to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours leveling up their hitpoints over and over again, but for the casual player it means you can finish a run with a respectable 5000 gold and find all you can buy is an imperceptible +1% chance to crit, or change your HP from 502 to 503.

The story, or rather the tone, is likewise a bit of a mess. Most of the story is told through journals left all over the castle. You can stop to read them and absolutely kill the pace of your run. If you do, you'll find a sombre tail of frustrated revolution and uncaring aristocrats. One area tells the story of dredging the bodies of the dead from a lake, but being unable to bury them because the living are too few in number. The sombre tone is completely at odds with the rest of the game- the resolution to that story is a boss fight with two gigantic cartoon skeleton pirates, apparently created from everyone who died in the lake.

The battle between these two tones isn't that dissimilar to the first game. They both feature IBS and twist reveals of tragic villains, but the massively increased budget of the sequel has left more time and space for jokes. It's not just IBS for fart jokes, there's super IBS, and pizza, endless, endless pizza jokes. I think they should have axed the more serious elements completely and just focused on the lighthearted content.

Overall, middling.

Sistema de classes é muito bom, pois o playstyle de cada classe é bem diferenciado não só pela arma main, mas também pela habilidade fixa. Basicamente zerei jogando só de arqueiro e assassino sendo que o jogo 1 foi feito pra jogar só de cavaleiro. O jogo só tem 2 defeitos muito grandes: a trilha sonora é tão mediocre que preferi jogar ouvindo Spotify, e falta pontos de interesse nos mapas que incentive o player a explorar ao invés de simplesmente focar em achar o boss, um exemplo disso seria adicionar mini bosses com recompensas únicas (há um mapa que tem mini bosses, mas com outras intenções, e pelo simples fato de ter isso foi um dos melhores mapas). E falando em mapas, aqui há 7, todos bem únicos e com batalhas de boss do mesmo nível de qualidade (ou até mais) que Hollow Knight (no quesito mecânica), ainda mais porque o combate é incrível, tem um skill GAP insano pois o jogo disponibiliza certas mecânicas de movimentação muito simples mas com diversas possibilidades.

Mejor que el primero en todo, pero al tener tanto contenido y tener que morir tanto para desbloquearlo se hace pesado. Además la dificultad es muy artificial.

El control es casi perfecto y cada mejora da bastante gustito.

Los logros que se consiguen por RNG me han desplazado la hairline 1cm para atrás.

Never played Rogue Legacy but immediately loved this one once I started seeing how much fun the movement options are and how different the classes played (my favorite is Chef). However I don't think I can bring myself to finish it. A lot of the areas and bosses past the halfway point feel so oppressive with their difficulty and I don't feel like grinding out money runs to maybe have a better shot. Still well worth the experience for the first half, but I wish it wasn't so difficult in the later half.

Rogue Legacy 2 has a lot in common with Rogue Legacy, including its progression and level structure, but adds character classes and some NPCs to interact with between attempts. I didn't find much to like about these additions, unfortunately, and the sheer amount of stuff here feels like it completely breaks open some of the cracks in the original game's design. Although I think it is pretty fundamentally flawed from a systems and implementation perspective, Rogue Legacy 2 still plays fairly well -- it can be fun to just blast through a couple of runs.

There is more narrative than in the first game, but it didn't land for me at all. The story of the castle and bosses is expounded upon at every opportunity, but without successfully conveying anything about what is going on. It seems like it is trying to be mysterious, but it just feels like disjointed nonsense.
The added NPC characters have a lot to say, most of which is rote jokes that don't really land. I didn't find much to like about or care about in them. (Also, the game sticks with the idea that you play as a series of heirs, so... are these NPCs all immortal or something? Maybe it is explained in dialog that I skipped.)
There is so much writing in this game, but none of it does the baseline job of giving my character a reason to explore the castle or care.

Control is simple, with a jump, dash, and "kick flip" which can be used to bounce off of enemies. They all feel pretty responsive and dodging and navigating with these abilities is usually fairly easy.
Some implementation and style choices hamstring this for me, however. The complex rules about what can reset your dash and jump make it hard to track which are available to you at any given time and the lack of adequate forgiveness mechanics around the kick flip and jumps make them feel unresponsive during the most intense situations. Many of the attacks and enemies are hard to read -- hits often surprise you in a bad way.

Each of the classes you can play as has a unique weapon and ability, though I found I didn't like using many of them. Rogue Legacy 2 tries to incentivize using different classes by giving them mastery levels which reward passive bonuses, but like most of the upgrades in the game they are too granular to have much impact or be an incentive.
The bard, however, is a standout. They throw out musical notes which they can use the kick flip to jump off of and cause damage in an area. It changes how you think about the space and how combat works in a fun, expressive way. I would have loved more classes with this level of creativity and uniqueness.
Magic spells can mix things up a bit as well, but are mostly similar versions of a projectile or AoE effect.

On a run-to-run basis, the game adds variety through artifacts, which give you unique abilities or effects. Wildly, collecting these past a certain point reduces your max health (!?), actively disincentivizing you from doing the thing that might make your run varied and interesting. This feels like a decision made by someone who doesn't understand the genre. As in the first game, they seem to expect the permanent progression to be the thing that carries you through the game. However...

Although it is the core of Rogue Legacy 2, I found a lot of mechanical problems with the permanent progression systems.
There are a ton of upgrades to buy, paid for with money you earn on each run. They are intensely granular, so most of them just don't really matter except in aggregate. I found myself just buying whatever I could afford, rather than working towards goals and getting excited about upgrades.
Many of the upgrades are unclear or only have second order effects, which makes them unsatisfying. I can upgrade my rune capacity, but I have to buy runes to fill that capacity, so is it valuable right now? I can upgrade my total equipment weight, increasing the amount I can wear before I hit the Dark Souls-style weight breakpoints which only seem to affect how many artifacts I can pick up in the dungeon before they start reducing my max health, I guess? I can upgrade my focus to improve spell crits, but is the Wizard's regular attack a spell? I can buy and upgrade about 10 different types of equipment, but the benefits seem to be set-bonus based, so I can't tell what they are until I buy them all.
Even the most expensive upgrades (which aren't very exciting regardless) are removed as long-term goals by the Charon mechanic, which prevents you from saving up in any meaningful way. The game wants you to afford these with gold farming runs through easy parts of the castle, but I never felt motivated to do so and the fast travel to later areas makes this less than compelling.
The first game was small and simple enough that this progression system worked and farming runs made more sense. Here it has broken under the weight of everything else that is going on.

I had an ok time with Rogue Legacy 2, but it doesn't have enough variety between runs or sense of real progression to overcome the control and systemic flaws and make me want to keep playing it. If you were a massive fan of the first one, you may find a lot to like here, since it is basically just more and better, for some definition of better. If you just want a fun roguelike with great mechanics, play Hades, Binding of Isaac, or Spelunky.

A fantastic roguelite with a few metroidvania elements mixed into it, Rogue Legacy 2 is a fantastic sequel. The bosses are way better and more unique, each of the classes, the new classes (+ class changes) are all fantastic (minus Bard), the switch to 3D models works incredibly well, and the lore is nice to read and try to piece together (even though I wish you didn't apparently have to through NG+ 8 times to get it all). The main negative thing I have to say about RL2 that keeps it from a 10/10 is just the upgrade/equipment progression system - it feels grindy and annoying by lategame to try and afford anything, especially when it's mostly up to RNG for things dropping ore and red aether AFAIK.

Ignoring that though, I 100% recommend Rogue Legacy 2 to any roguelike/lite fans out there, and it's definitely a must play for anyone who liked Rogue Legacy 1.