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.

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