Rogue Legacy: Don’t think too hard about biology

I’d heard good things about this one. Seen some speedruns, et cetera. So I picked it up to have a go myself.

I love the core idea of this game. You play as a member of this long family line of rogues, and when that character dies, you pick one of their children to play as. The children all have different classes and traits that will help and hinder you on your quest. Any upgrades and equipment you had on previous characters carry over to their children.

Your quest is to explore a castle (And associated areas). For each character, the castle (And associated areas) shuffle themselves around a bit into new configurations, so your experience in there with each character is fresh. Your overall goal is to defeat the boss of each area to unlock the door in the lobby which leads to the secret treasure of the castle.

Okay I’ll confess: I haven’t finished this one. I . . . got bored.

It’s fun, I’ll admit. The controls are (Mostly) tight, and for a good while I was entertained by the variety of experiences. But the game has a few problems that caused me to get tired of seeing the same rooms over and over far faster than I should have.

Namely, the level system. I’m not sure what levels actually do other than increase the price of your upgrades. So let’s say that you have a run of bad luck in the castle and come out without enough gold to buy new upgrades for your new character. You are, however, guaranteed to have gained a level or two, so now those upgrades cost even more gold! Oh and you can say goodbye to that gold you collected, because unless you have a few upgrades, Charon’s taking ALL of it before you go into that castle. A few runs of bad luck and you’re far, far behind, struggling to buy each new upgrade and get to the next boss.

The controls do have a few issues, namely things like the double jump being VERY picky about whether you have landed on a platform or not. It can look as though you have, so you go to do a long leap into the air, but end up taking a short hop into a large projectile.

It was fun for the time I played it. There’s a huge amount of variety in there! Lots of stuff to find! Good bloody luck finding it before you’ve seen every room with every class under the sun!

One other slight issue is that you quickly learn which traits to avoid. You see a child with glaucoma? You ain’t pickin’ them. Not if you have any sense.

So, I’ll quickly go over the story, which is actually quite clever. You start the game playing as a knight who climbs through part of the castle and comes upon a kingly-looking chap drinking from a fountain. At this point your only option is to hit said bloke with your sword and begin your legacy. You then go on playing as this knight’s descendants. As they go around the castle, they find the journals of their ancestor, who sought out a cure for his father’s illness in the castle and went about defeating the four creatures and opening the door – only to find that his father had beat him there and drunk from the fountain of youth within. Angered that his father would never die and he would never receive his inheritance, your ancestor strikes him down. So when you at last open that door, the fight awaiting you is, of course, the first character you played as! Neat!

Would I recommend it? Ye-es, okay. But don’t do as I did. Be extra careful. Be clever with your upgrades. Don’t worry too much about grinding gold, find and defeat the bosses as quickly as possible. For a game with such a huge variety of fun to have, it’s very easy to get bored.

Saints Row IV: Revolutions

Over the past 11 days since my last review, I have spent 28 Hours playing Saints’ Row IV. I’m pretty sure that’s where the apostrophe goes. Anyway, at least one of those was spent on character creation because if there’s one thing that sells a game to me, it’s deep and complex character creation. Sadly, as with Saints’ Row the Third, it isn’t quite as vast as Saints’ Row 2. I mean, in that game, sex was a slider. Nevertheless, I was able to create my perfect blonde be-pigtailed French sociopath to my satisfaction and I enclose an image, because heck, I’m proud –

And then a Frenchwoman became le président des Etats-Unis d’Amérique. Sacrebleu!

Over the course of the Saints’ Row franchise we see the Street Gang known as the Third Street Saints rise to power in the city of Stilwater (Twice!), become national idols who have films made about them and sell energy drinks, take over the city of Steelport and now we see the leader of the Saints (Our protagonist) become the President of the United States. I mean, it’s a natural progression. What do you expect, really?

So some spoilers concerning what I think of the story. Having been in office for several years, suddenly the world comes under attack from a group of aliens called the Zin empire. Emperor Zinyak abducts all humans he considers worthy, and places their minds in a simulation. A few of the Saints escape this simulation and set about rescuing their friends, including the protagonist, who has been trapped in a 50’s sitcom where they cannot do anything out of order, even swear. Seeing their resistance, Zinyak blows up the earth. As you do. So the Saints set about rescuing all their comrades from simulated nightmares using superpowers that they hack into the simulation and getting ready to give Zinyak an extreme Up Yours.
It’s not the most complex plot. Not that your goal has ever been THAT complex in a Saints’ Row game, yet . . . I dunno, in the last few games you had multiple villains with their own little story arcs that you took down individually before you went after the big bad. In this it’s just Zinyak, Zinyak, Zinyak and . . . while he’s a fabulous villain in some ways, it made the story lack the variety of goals that the previous games had. What Zinyak DOES do is pop up and be hilariously annoying a lot. Which makes you all the more eager to go and smash his head in. Well played, good villain.
As for characters, all your favourites are there like Matt Miller, British gang-leader turned MI6 agent and Viola . . . wait, where the fuck is Viola? She’s dead? She died when the – OKAY I’M OUT, 1/A*, BG BG BG. Okay yeah, a few characters died when the earth blew up. Alright. I’ll accept it. At least I have you, Matt Miller. The game also seems to think I care a lot more about Johnny Gat than I actually do. He’s an alright bloke, but I wasn’t upset by his death in the last game, nor am I elated that it turns out he was just abducted by aliens and trapped in a 2D side-scrolling beat-’em-up in this game.
You’ll also find a ton of references to other franchises. Mass Effect’s loyalty missions, the Matrix is pretty much a given here. Even Men in Black. Hidden in one of the shops is the “Loud Locust”, the tiny pistol that causes large explosions.
I’ll give. I liked the writing in this game. I like playing as an insane sociopath. As usual, the comedy was top hole, the characters were all likeable – well . . . except maybe Shaundi. Speaking of, they make a “thing” out of how much Shaundi changed between SR2 and SR3. She went from being a chilled-out party-person to being constantly angry in a flash. Apparently she blamed herself for Johnny’s death and wanted to be more of a help rather than a kidnap-happy sidekick. I can’t help but find the conflict between the two when Shaundi meets a simulation of her old self a sort of reverse commentary on the progression of the Saints’ Row games.

Y’see, Saints’ Row 1 was trying to be GTA. It was a gritty crime sandbox game. But as the series progresses it gets more and more . . . nuts. SR2 was still pretty gritty, but you could commit all that horrible murder in a really stupid costume and hose down houses with the contents of a septic tank. SR3 went further off the wall with Zombie outbreaks and that whole part where you enter Matt Miller’s virtual world to take him down and spend some time playing as a toilet. And then there’s . . . this game. Aliens and superpowers and so forth.
You see, I really, desperately wanted to hate this game. SR2 had a dichotomy between the serious and the silly that just . . . really worked. The next two games felt like the developers saw this and said “Oh, you like silly, huh? We’ll SHOW you silly.” It feels . . . cheap. I feel like I’m being given fast food. I feel like they know exactly how to push buttons to give me instant gratification and they’re just slamming on them.

They know the formula works. You throw ’em in, give ’em a couple of weapons and vehicles and a bunch of activities, maybe a mission or two. Doing all the fun mini-games lets you upgrade your weapons and abilities to cause more chaos. Of course, this time some of those abilities are superpowers like telekinesis. Only . . . okay. You’re SUPPOSED to ramp up the difficulty as you go as well. You should also try and hide the collectibles used to upgrade your powers a little better. Because I breezed through most of the game with my huge arsenal of weapons and powers very easily. Once you get the “Explode upon death” for your fireball, you can just lob one into a group of enemies and then go make a snack while your work is done for you. Because enemies caught in the explosions ALSO CATCH ON FIRE AND EXPLODE WHEN THEY DIE. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have been idly completing nearby activities and should have waited for the “Side-quests” that required me to do them to show up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been darting about the city grabbing power clusters between missions. Maybe I shouldn’t have been buying the bonuses first, then the health, combat and damage reduction abilities. Maybe I shouldn’t have been focusing on fully upgrading a couple of guns!
I also feel like the most wasn’t made of the superpowers. It might just be me, but I felt like there weren’t enough superpower-focused activities. Just sayin’.
Apart from that, the gameplay is Saints’ Row. If you’ve played a Saints’ Row game, you know how this is going to be. That said, the superpowers are REALLY sweet. Aside from the glide being a bit janky before you get the ability that allows you to aim yourself exactly where you want to land, it was incredibly fun swooping around the city chucking fireballs, picking up cars with my mind, et cetera.

What WOULD have been nice would have been if the entire map hadn’t just been ported over from the last game. Come on, couldn’t I have been flying around somewhere NEW instead of just Steelport again?

So . . . I dunno. I begrudgingly admit that I had a lot of fun playing this game. Heck, I wouldn’t have spent 28 hours playing it if I hadn’t. In fact, I’m going to go and do the DLC content when I finish writing this. It feels a bit sparse. In Saints Row’ 2, it would take a LONG time to get done with all the activities. The focus seems to be more on things you can USE rather than things you can DO. In some ways, it feels a bit . . . TOO similar to the other games. Yes, it’s a sequel and you’d EXPECT it to be much the same, but with the game-changer that is superpowers and outer space travel, it feels like the most wasn’t made out of them, instead choosing to stick to the same old activities and such.

Maybe they know that. Maybe all the things they COULD have done with this are being reserved for a fifth Saints’ Row game. I’m down for it. The Saints set out to conquer the galaxy? Spaceship combat, zero gravity shenanigans? Can I get a hell yeah? But then again, maybe that would be milking it at this point. They’ve already gone utterly bonkers – at the end, the Saints take over the Zin empire and unlock the secrets of time travel. Oooh, Saints through time! I’d play that, too! But the end of the game does feel set up to be a finale of sorts. The Saints are the last remaining humans, now in charge of a vast intergalactic, technologically advanced empire, able to time travel back into the Earth’s greatest hits any time they like. There’s even a dance party at the end. They even had a dance party! They play Aerosmith’s “I don’t want to miss a thing” at the end of the credits!

It always feels good. The developers always work hard and make something fun and hilarious. But at the same time, I’m philosophically in favour of stories ending where they should. Philosophically, I’m opposed to another sequel. Realistically? I’d play the shit out of another sequel.

But what the hell would they call it? They’ve exhausted all the naming conventions. They did a plain number they did the Nth, they did Roman Numerals, they . . . oh.

Bring on Saints’ Row: Something beginning with “Re”