In Short: A game lacking the charm of its predecessor while expanding on some of its least appealing elements.
There's something missing in Rogue Legacy 2, deep at the core. Despite not being a huge metroidvania fan, I was hooked by the relative simplicity of the original game. It built up its mechanics carefully as you delved deeper, presenting the player with just enough different options to feel varied without digging itself too deep into a systemic hole. Even bad runs felt like progress, and even the worst downside felt at least manageable.
Rogue Legacy 2 does not build upon its predecessor's achievements, however. Systems are overly complex out of the gate, with the game expanding its system of items and equipment in a way that feels like a chore to manage, and that undermines sense of progress regularly as a fairly successful run ends and offers little in the way of upgrades thanks to an inanely complicated array of different items and shops.
This division interacts negatively with the game's reduced emphasis on boss fights, as the overall power gain available to the player appears much lower - likely to avoid players blowing through a game that no longer requires multiple big boss fights every run. This more compressed power curve is then filtered through a wider array of stuff to buy, leading to the game feeling like a slog of grinding reliant on luck to break out and make progress.
In combat, the previously "nice to have" secondary weapons feel vital in a way that distracts from actually playing the game. A handful are too finicky, or too useless, to bother with. Still more feel too integral to the success of a run to ignore, despite offering little enjoyment to engage with or a frustrating amount of micromanagement to avoid being left helpless. Very rarely did they feel fun or rewarding to use, however.
Compounding the latter is an overall worse set of classes to work with. Some basics return, but the advanced classes have been reworked almost entirely, and almost entirely for the worse. Almost half of the classes feel like taking them on a run is setting yourself up for failure, without any subsequent reward. Ranged classes reveal themselves to be mostly bad, at least in the earlier portions I managed to get to before my interest wore thin.
This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, the first game had a similar vibe at times, but it was far fewer and further between, and no class felt as far off of viable as so many of Rogue Legacy 2's do.
This sensation isn't helped by a design mismatch between the game's negative character traits, and its new focus on traversal instead of combat. Things that presented a challenge, or annoyance, in combat in the original game, are now capable of rendering a run entirely pointless - or so annoying that continuing to attempt it is simply a waste of time you could be having fun with some other game.
Where the latter game used to gate you by your ability to clear bosses, or persist long enough to overpower them, Rogue Legacy 2 demands instead that you tediously poke blindly around the map for special items - a feature borrowed from its inspiration that results mostly in runs feeling like a total waste of time as, again, no real progress is achieved thanks to your not finding an item. There's also far more platforming focused areas in Rogue Legacy 2, an element rendered infuriating when combined with the aforementioned negative traits.
Perhaps some people will find navigating Axis Mundi with a blind or movement reduced character a fun challenge. As profound hater of any platforming experience that isn't absolutely exceptional, I threw myself into the void and ended the run instead of wasting my time.
While the original Rogue Legacy offered its share of platforming, it felt marginal, and designed with the rest of the game in mind. Like an extra challenge, not a fundamental roadblock to continued enjoyment. Platforming was a vehicle for exploration, a necessity in a 2D world, but as with the best of its classic inspiration, rarely the focal point. Even contemporary counterpoints, like Dead Cells, manage to avoid this fundamental pitfall and use the platforming to make the game more engaging instead of just providing roadblocks.
This feels like a failure of design, as does much of Rogue Legacy 2. Like a game whose new elements were constructed in a black box, and then quickly rushed out and balanced on top of a stripped bare version of what already existed before anyone really sat down to hammer out the details of how it all fit together.
The visuals only soured me further. Clean and smooth, ultimately nice looking, but empty feeling. The simple charm of the first game, which evoked classic metroidvania games, is replaced here by something more akin to contemporary entries like Hollow Knight; which in turn makes the game stand out less. They aren't so much bad as they are uninspiring, and I was hoping for more than "good enough" for the followup to one of my favorite games of all time.
There's something missing in Rogue Legacy 2, deep at the core. Despite not being a huge metroidvania fan, I was hooked by the relative simplicity of the original game. It built up its mechanics carefully as you delved deeper, presenting the player with just enough different options to feel varied without digging itself too deep into a systemic hole. Even bad runs felt like progress, and even the worst downside felt at least manageable.
Rogue Legacy 2 does not build upon its predecessor's achievements, however. Systems are overly complex out of the gate, with the game expanding its system of items and equipment in a way that feels like a chore to manage, and that undermines sense of progress regularly as a fairly successful run ends and offers little in the way of upgrades thanks to an inanely complicated array of different items and shops.
This division interacts negatively with the game's reduced emphasis on boss fights, as the overall power gain available to the player appears much lower - likely to avoid players blowing through a game that no longer requires multiple big boss fights every run. This more compressed power curve is then filtered through a wider array of stuff to buy, leading to the game feeling like a slog of grinding reliant on luck to break out and make progress.
In combat, the previously "nice to have" secondary weapons feel vital in a way that distracts from actually playing the game. A handful are too finicky, or too useless, to bother with. Still more feel too integral to the success of a run to ignore, despite offering little enjoyment to engage with or a frustrating amount of micromanagement to avoid being left helpless. Very rarely did they feel fun or rewarding to use, however.
Compounding the latter is an overall worse set of classes to work with. Some basics return, but the advanced classes have been reworked almost entirely, and almost entirely for the worse. Almost half of the classes feel like taking them on a run is setting yourself up for failure, without any subsequent reward. Ranged classes reveal themselves to be mostly bad, at least in the earlier portions I managed to get to before my interest wore thin.
This isn't necessarily a new phenomenon, the first game had a similar vibe at times, but it was far fewer and further between, and no class felt as far off of viable as so many of Rogue Legacy 2's do.
This sensation isn't helped by a design mismatch between the game's negative character traits, and its new focus on traversal instead of combat. Things that presented a challenge, or annoyance, in combat in the original game, are now capable of rendering a run entirely pointless - or so annoying that continuing to attempt it is simply a waste of time you could be having fun with some other game.
Where the latter game used to gate you by your ability to clear bosses, or persist long enough to overpower them, Rogue Legacy 2 demands instead that you tediously poke blindly around the map for special items - a feature borrowed from its inspiration that results mostly in runs feeling like a total waste of time as, again, no real progress is achieved thanks to your not finding an item. There's also far more platforming focused areas in Rogue Legacy 2, an element rendered infuriating when combined with the aforementioned negative traits.
Perhaps some people will find navigating Axis Mundi with a blind or movement reduced character a fun challenge. As profound hater of any platforming experience that isn't absolutely exceptional, I threw myself into the void and ended the run instead of wasting my time.
While the original Rogue Legacy offered its share of platforming, it felt marginal, and designed with the rest of the game in mind. Like an extra challenge, not a fundamental roadblock to continued enjoyment. Platforming was a vehicle for exploration, a necessity in a 2D world, but as with the best of its classic inspiration, rarely the focal point. Even contemporary counterpoints, like Dead Cells, manage to avoid this fundamental pitfall and use the platforming to make the game more engaging instead of just providing roadblocks.
This feels like a failure of design, as does much of Rogue Legacy 2. Like a game whose new elements were constructed in a black box, and then quickly rushed out and balanced on top of a stripped bare version of what already existed before anyone really sat down to hammer out the details of how it all fit together.
The visuals only soured me further. Clean and smooth, ultimately nice looking, but empty feeling. The simple charm of the first game, which evoked classic metroidvania games, is replaced here by something more akin to contemporary entries like Hollow Knight; which in turn makes the game stand out less. They aren't so much bad as they are uninspiring, and I was hoping for more than "good enough" for the followup to one of my favorite games of all time.