So I like how dying means rolling a new character with different attacks and abilities. It’s the difference between randomizing the contents of a bag of crisps and randomizing which bodily orifice you’re inserting them into. Your procedural game design lesson of the day is that rearranging the level layout doesn’t matter for shit if the primary gameplay loop doesn’t change. Still, at least fallen lords with back problems are more interesting to fight than just big versions of standard enemies which were the boss fights in Rogue Legacy 1, even if it’d be nice to take a break from the fucking Soulsy shit one of these days and play a game about, I dunno, deflecting nuggets of unsolicited information about the sex lives of four grotesquely wealthy middle-aged women. A plot that seems to be themed around tragedy and hubris and is tonally at odds with the surface level gameplay where we might be playing as a character with clown disease who can double jump from the power of their earth-shattering farts. Why the fuck would you say Sex and the Ci – I don’t know! You caught me on the spot! So now the environments are all grand cathedrals, ruined towns and magic libraries, the boss fights are all against tortured fallen lords with severe back problems, and there’s a rather convoluted plot running behind everything that we piece together from random document finds. Er… Sex and the City? What? No! Dark Souls! It’s gone a bit Dark Soulsy on us like 90% of high profile indie games these days. Rogue Legacy 2 is basically the same game with more bits and bobs and better design and smooth cartoony hand-animated artwork that never trundles across the eyeballs like a caterpillar in spiked running shoes.Īlthough since the first game it’s taken some influence from – go on, have a guess. Rogue Legacy 1 was all in pixel art and kept doing that thing where they’d double the size of a pixel art enemy to make a boss version and it looked like absolute crunchy sweetcorn buttholes. Although note that I said I “liked” Rogue Legacy 1, past tense, and I say that because Rogue Legacy 2 is going right next to Left 4 Dead 2 and Hand of Fate 2 on my “sequels that mean we don’t need the original anymore” shelf. I like a challenge, but I think I liked it a lot more before every bloody indie game decided it was their duty to take turns making sure my bollocks are never un-swollen, and Rogue Legacy instead just throwing cups of cold piss in my face is a refreshing break. The permanent upgrading made it pretty easygoing as Roguelikes go. I’m all about 2D Castlevania-style platformers, I love swinging around a sword so big it clips through a wall and hits a floating medusa head on the other side in an absolute debasement of physics. But don’t mistake my tone: I really liked Rogue Legacy 1. The only roguelike thing about it is that the castle procedurally regenerates with each attempt like the board of directors at a doomed startup. Also since the definition of “roguelike” these days is about as much to do with the original Rogue as a pig holding a fish in its mouth has to do with Yoko Ono, all your upgrades and progress through the castle’s sequence of boss fights is kept permanently. Every time you die you switch to controlling the next heir in your family bloodline, meaning presumably that each attempt takes place decades apart so it’s weird none of the NPCs ever age or move somewhere else and the surrounding world never invents flying cars no matter how many generations go through the meat grinder of my shitty dodge reflexes but we’re probably not supposed to point this out. Not to be confused with Rouge Legacy, which is the biopic of the man who had the idea to put tits in Sonic the Hedgehog, Rogue Legacy is, funnily enough, a Legacy Roguelike. I’ve been playing Rogue Legacy 2, which last week triumphantly produced the stained bedsheet representing its graduation from girlhood innocence. It’s been like showing a roomful of ten year old schoolkids that one video about periods and watching as one by one the innocence fades from their eyes. Blimey, a lot of shit’s been popping off of Early Access lately.
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