My experience with Rogue Legacy was about as erratic and unexpected as the flight path of one of those stupid haunted painting enemies: I went in expecting a fun little diversion, only to get sucked in by the Skinner box mechanics. Then I hit the proverbial wall labelled 'skill issue' and got really frustrated, wanting to finish the game just so I could say I gave it a fair shot but ready to give it a 2.5 or 3 star review. And as I kept soldiering on... something happened. I started to enjoy myself, I kept going on "just one more run for today" out of enjoyment rather than spite, and my dreams were replaced by a neverending torrent of varied projectiles and spike traps. I completed the game, sat down to write this review, decided "eh why don't I try a bit of New Game Plus?" and 5 hours later I'd completed a run of NG+.
I suppose the question here is: is this procgen Roguelite Metroidvania a fantastic game, or is it an addictive but mediocre one? And I suppose the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
It's easy for me to list why this isn't in the top tier of Metroidvanias or Roguelites: the randomly-generated levels are serviceable but samey, lacking the deliberately-curated pacing of powering up through exploration and discovery that the best examples of the genre all boast. The simplistic jump-and-slash-and-cast gameplay leaves very little room for the emergent gameplay I like in my favorite Roguelites (see Streets of Rogue) - in fact, many of the challenge rooms are tailored for a specific loadout of skills/gear and are impossible to complete without them. And the game's unique selling point - the randomly-generated traits each hero has - are an underused design space, adding very little to the gameplay. There are some interesting ones like OCD (gain MP for breaking stuff), but the vast majority of them are either extremely situational (you don't trigger spike traps), purely cosmetic (baldness), or utterly infuriating (vertigo, which flips the entire screen upside-down) - leading each generation's new heroes to blend together after awhile.
What makes Rogue Legacy a very good game nevertheless, are these two principles:
- Getting good at a hard game is one of the most rewarding experiences as a gamer
- It's better for a game to be motivating than "fair". A game can be the most brutally unforgiving bastard ever made, but if it keeps me around long enough for me to get good, then it's done its job better than a more well-balanced game that didn't hook me in for whatever reason.
It's in this aspect that Rogue Legacy excels. Your gear and stat upgrades are always passed on to the next generation, so instead of powering up through exploration and discovery like in a typical Metroidvania, you actually power up by dying. And by respawning you not at the main hub but the upgrade screen, the game takes some of the psychological sting out of the (often bullshit) deaths and gives you the impetus to just try another run. And as the runs piled up, not only did my character get better but so did I - I know I got better because I cleared each new area faster than I did the last, and I rather unexpectedly beat the final boss on my first try! The much harder NG+ which featured upgraded versions of every enemy with bullet-hell attack patterns was dispatched in just over a third of the time as the vanilla run. And really, the extremely simple gameplay requires and refines all the skills that a good platformer should have - clever use of movement tools to evade enemy attacks, near-pixel-perfect knowledge of hitboxes and hurtboxes, the ability to instantaneously assess all the threats in a room and decide what to do first, knowing when to say "screw it" and explore somewhere else first... the flow state I was rewarded with after sticking with this game through my frustrations was well worth it. And when a character you meet later on laments that he's forgotten what the sun feels like, I could only nod and say "Me too, game. Me too."
I suppose the question here is: is this procgen Roguelite Metroidvania a fantastic game, or is it an addictive but mediocre one? And I suppose the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
It's easy for me to list why this isn't in the top tier of Metroidvanias or Roguelites: the randomly-generated levels are serviceable but samey, lacking the deliberately-curated pacing of powering up through exploration and discovery that the best examples of the genre all boast. The simplistic jump-and-slash-and-cast gameplay leaves very little room for the emergent gameplay I like in my favorite Roguelites (see Streets of Rogue) - in fact, many of the challenge rooms are tailored for a specific loadout of skills/gear and are impossible to complete without them. And the game's unique selling point - the randomly-generated traits each hero has - are an underused design space, adding very little to the gameplay. There are some interesting ones like OCD (gain MP for breaking stuff), but the vast majority of them are either extremely situational (you don't trigger spike traps), purely cosmetic (baldness), or utterly infuriating (vertigo, which flips the entire screen upside-down) - leading each generation's new heroes to blend together after awhile.
What makes Rogue Legacy a very good game nevertheless, are these two principles:
- Getting good at a hard game is one of the most rewarding experiences as a gamer
- It's better for a game to be motivating than "fair". A game can be the most brutally unforgiving bastard ever made, but if it keeps me around long enough for me to get good, then it's done its job better than a more well-balanced game that didn't hook me in for whatever reason.
It's in this aspect that Rogue Legacy excels. Your gear and stat upgrades are always passed on to the next generation, so instead of powering up through exploration and discovery like in a typical Metroidvania, you actually power up by dying. And by respawning you not at the main hub but the upgrade screen, the game takes some of the psychological sting out of the (often bullshit) deaths and gives you the impetus to just try another run. And as the runs piled up, not only did my character get better but so did I - I know I got better because I cleared each new area faster than I did the last, and I rather unexpectedly beat the final boss on my first try! The much harder NG+ which featured upgraded versions of every enemy with bullet-hell attack patterns was dispatched in just over a third of the time as the vanilla run. And really, the extremely simple gameplay requires and refines all the skills that a good platformer should have - clever use of movement tools to evade enemy attacks, near-pixel-perfect knowledge of hitboxes and hurtboxes, the ability to instantaneously assess all the threats in a room and decide what to do first, knowing when to say "screw it" and explore somewhere else first... the flow state I was rewarded with after sticking with this game through my frustrations was well worth it. And when a character you meet later on laments that he's forgotten what the sun feels like, I could only nod and say "Me too, game. Me too."