Barbarians, who use huge axes for massive damage and can also yell to temporarily freeze enemies in place.Valkyries (my personal favorite), whose spears can be aimed up or down in addition to forward, and can be quickly twirled to reflect incoming projectiles.Sure, there’s still the basic knight with the same sword from RL1. The big thing that RL2 does to improve on the class system is that it gives each class an entirely unique starting weapon, along with other special properties and abilities unique to that class. After a while a few classes seemed to simply surpass others, and runs could start to feel pretty same-y. All carried the same basic sword melee weapon, and while each had a special ability, the differences were mainly in the stats some had more HP but less mana, others had a high chance to critically strike but had low base attack power, etc. In RL1, classes seemed like a big part of the game, but in retrospect, they just weren’t all that well-differentiated. Let’s talk about how, shall we? Character classes Classes are way more differentiated this time around I think I’d go so far as to say that Cellar Door Games probably made a mistake by releasing it as early as they did the game might have earned better word of mouth if they had waited a few more months.īut as time went by and regular large content updates happened, the game rather quickly surpassed its predecessor in virtually every way imaginable. At the initial early access price of $15.99 (which has since increased to reflect a more complete product-it’s now $24.99), you were investing on the promise of the game rather than what was actually there. There are some early access games that are first released at a point where they’re already worth their asking price RL2 was not one of them. It had only one “biome,” a small and uninteresting bunch of upgrades, few classes, and (to the best of my recollection) no completed bosses to fight. Though the core gameplay felt pretty good even at this early stage, the game at this point was, quite honestly, very content-light and thin. This was the extent of the castle upgrades in the initial early access release of RL2. Anyway, GB did an “Unfinished” and other games press did their own coverage. The global pandemic had properly begun about five months earlier weird to think that the game’s entire front-facing development cycle took place during COVID. It was fun to keep starting new runs knowing that I was not only getting better at playing the game myself, but was also entering with a continually more capable character.įast-forward to August 2020, when Cellar Door Games released an early build of Rogue Legacy 2 on Steam Early Access. I just knew that I really enjoyed the idea of continuing to power up my character on the way to finally clearing the game. Games like Dead Cells and Hades were not yet a thought. I logged 40.7 hours on it on Steam, maxing out the upgrades and clearing multiple NG+ cycles, and also bought the game on Playstation. By putting a heavy focus on upgrading your character between runs, it injected an element of character-building power fantasy into the more established Rogue like genre, which eschewed permanent upgrades in favor of a uniform starting point for each run. Regardless, what is not in dispute is that the original Rogue Legacy helped to define and popularize the “lite” elements in Roguelites. However, it appears that Cellar Door Games may, in fact, have been the first game developer to coin the term. Strictly speaking, I don’t think this is actually true, as the “lite” elements of Roguelites had been around for some time, even if in a somewhat embryonic and diffuse form compared to the fairly distinct genre we see today. In the lead-up to RL2’s 1.0 release, I noticed some people claiming that the first Rogue Legacy actually *invented* the Rogue lite genre when it was released in 2013. But hopefully someone out there will find it informative and be encouraged to give it a shot. I’m not sure I would call what follows a “review,” if only because I love this game so much that I find it hard to be all that objective about it (for the record: I’ve logged 174 hours on the early access version of the game). Rogue Legacy 2 has just hit version 1.0, and I knew I wanted to post something about it for the release.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |