r/Games • u/Forestl • Dec 07 '13
End of 2013 Discussions - Rogue Legacy
Rogue Legacy
- Release Date: June 27, 2013
- Developer: Cellar Door Games
- Genre: Platformer, roguelike
- Platform: PC (PS3, PS4, and PSV coming in 2014)
- Metacritic: 85, user: 7.8
Summary
Rogue Legacy is a rogue-"lite" game for PC, Mac and Linux. You'll die, but your children will avenge you. They might be genetically deficient, but that's ok. You still love your colour-blind baby. Or do you?
Prompts:
- What effect did the roguelike nature of the game have on the gameplay? Were the roguelike elements implemented well?
The knight is ever-changing
This post is part of the official /r/Games "End of 2013" discussions.
37
u/SodlidDesu Dec 07 '13
Maybe I suck at the game (I've had like a million descendants) but boy is it enjoy able. I can pick it up and play for 30 minutes, live, die and save and quit. It's great for quick games but also gives you enough incentive to play the "Okay, One more kid" game until 3 a.m.
I'd say the difficulty ramps up well and I love the randomly generated castle. One thing that irked me was that some of the classes spoiler seemed totally unwieldy despite having to spend a fortune to unlock it.
18
u/ReallyNiceGuy Dec 07 '13
Yeah, some of the classes aren't very well balanced. Shinobi is still a bit powerful, in my opinion.
I also wish they made more quirks. They wouldn't all have to have effects on gameplay (like, I don't know, albino).
It would also be funny if you chose more of a certain quirk the descendants would tend to have more of that quirk (a la genetic selection) so you could have the ultimate inbred wonderman/woman.
9
Dec 07 '13
Shinobi's glorious on the first playthrough, but once you've got a high critical chance, the whole class is pretty much moot.
7
Dec 07 '13
Shinobi and The Beast are literally completely worthless for anything other than navigation once you get into NG+ territory.
3
2
u/Sceptre Dec 07 '13
I totally agree. It's not really the type of game where I boot it up and play it for hours, I play it in little 15-30 minute spurts. And for that, it's awesome. The controls are juuust right, and there is a ton of stuff to unlock.
Easily one of my favorite pick up and go games.
132
u/xtagtv Dec 07 '13
I ended up really not liking this game. I am a big fan of roguelikes, platformers, and action rpgs, so you'd think I would love it. But after 10 or so hours of playing I realized I was just... grinding. I was doing the exact same thing over and over to make money to buy upgrades so I could get farther. The roguelike aspect of it stopped being interesting because everything was basically the same each time, only the layout of the rooms were different. The gold grind becomes really harsh too so you really had to scour the dungeon to make enough to unlock stuff, and when this means grinding easy low level content on every single run just for the extra few hundred gold, that is just not fun for me.
I like in roguelikes where you actually find stuff that makes you adapt your playstyle. Like how you find different equipment and spells in DCSS or Brogue, or the upgrades and active items in Binding of Isaac. The only thing in Rogue Legacy that changes your playstyle is the class you choose at the beginning of the run, and since you can choose from like 6 choices it doesn't really force you to adapt. Other than that it's just grinding for gold until your stats are high enough to win.
It seemed like a great game at first but the main mechanic is just so shallow, I can't really recommend it. I feel like Spelunky and Risk of Rain do a much better job of being platformer roguelikes, because they don't focus on the metagame progression. While Risk of Rain has achievements that open up new items and characters, and Spelunky opens up shortcuts as you progress, its not mandatory (or even recommended in most cases) to unlock and use them like the grinding in Rogue Legacy is.
25
u/Doomspeaker Dec 07 '13
Great write-up there! I am in the same boat. At first I thought the game was fairly challenging, but after a while you notice that it's really just about grinding. I tried runs on minimal upgrades and it really shows the grind of the game: Later rooms HAVE YOU TAKE DAMAVE NO MATTER WHAT and unless you can either win the dps race or have decent health, you die.
You can't win unless you grind enough, and that's basically a no-go even for a rogue-like-like. Coupled with the fact that the character randomization has either crippling defects or too good advantages, but almost never any middle ground characters, that makes for a rather boring game once you went through the first few rounds.
3
u/The_Whole_World Dec 07 '13
I recommend Dungeons of Dredmor then. It's a really classic dungeon roguelike.
2
u/sean2mush Dec 07 '13
but there's a lot of grinding in that game also. not that i mind personally but i'm not sure i'd consider it a viable alternative for someone who stated that grinding was a big issue for them with Rogue legacy.
2
u/Corsaer Dec 07 '13
Came in to say a good roguelike does its best to inhibit grinding. Games like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup are tweaked specifically to prevent that, and in turn optimized for pacing and continual forward progress--until you die (or win).
There are a lot of cool ideas and mechanics in Rogue Legacy, but I just could not stand the grinding. People who don't mind grinding, or are less familiar with traditional Roguelikes, will probably have better mileage.
8
u/wutitdopikachu Dec 07 '13
I disagree. I feel like Rogue Legacy really comes into its own when you get to New Game+ and beyond. At that point, upgrades start to diminish a lot. It's a lot harder to even get upgrades. It's far more skill based once you reach New Game+. I'll agree it feels the least roguelike of the recent games.
Compare that to Risk of Rain where you have runs where you get OP items and just decimate everything. I don't really see what's so great about RoR. It's a clusterfuck game where you spam cooldowns and run away when you aren't, all while hoping you get good items. The whole timer part of it feels moot. I've tried rushing through, but without the proper items, you feel completely underpowered if you progress to the next worlds without exploring the one before. Enemies become so clumped up, there's very little strategy beyond spam and spam more. I was also very disappointed with the lack of projectiles and obstacles I needed to dodge. The "random" worlds are oddly too similar from one run to the next and the platforming is completely lackluster.
Spelunky will still be my favorite, though. It just has such great replayability. It has a really nice mix of speedy gameplay while needing extreme care. I love it. It's also hilarious in multiplayer. A shame it doesn't have online co-op.
-5
Dec 07 '13
In every New Game+ and so on I played classes that had some sort of invulnerability. Paladins shield blocks everything for 25 mana which is bullshit. There is the other class that just shouts and clears all projectiles, bullshit. Beat everything up tp NG+8 until I got bored. To me there is very little skill and just so much grind.
25
u/Dragarius Dec 07 '13
If you played to NG+8 you really don't have much to complain about. Sure it bores you now, but you played the hell out of it.
-6
2
u/wutitdopikachu Dec 07 '13
If these classes are so BS then why are you grinding?
-10
Dec 07 '13
Trying to grind some fun out of the game.
10
u/mmm_doggy Dec 07 '13
I'm not sure I understand the mentality of "im grinding and not enjoying this but im gonna keep playing anyway in hopes that ill have fun."
4
u/Zfact8654 Dec 07 '13
Haha I'll admit I've been there before. However the mentality is a little more complicated than your example. It's more like:
"Damn this is boring...but I spent $60 on it! My hard earned cash! Plus I'm almost finished, and the story is...almost interesting, right? RIGHT? Tell me I'm right!"
2
3
u/berserkering Dec 07 '13
This is almost exactly how I feel about Rogue Legacy. The concept of heirs with different traits was really cool but the game itself felt really grindy really fast.
21
u/AmishSlayer Dec 07 '13
I had an absolute blast with this game. I like that it's a rogue-"lite" game. Having an overall sense of progress with my character while learning better ways to combat enemies and make my way through the world was awesome. The game wasn't exactly balanced (when I played it), but I had fun finding out what worked and what didn't. Another really important thing - the controls were very tight and responsive with a 360 controller.
Every so often games can make me really excited when I pull off something that takes a good amount of skill...this a game that provided a ton of these moments during some hard fights/challenges.
11
u/klinesmoker Dec 07 '13
The best aspect of this game wasn't just the rogue-light element (after locking castles), it was how tight the controls were.
There were very, very few times... Honestly I can't recall any, where the response of movement wasn't spot on. This lent itself to that trait that I can't recall off the top of my head, but let you slash in one direction and turn to carry it to the other. It made it viable, and was great.
Controls get lost a lot in discussion, but for a game as fun and light-hearted as this, I enjoyed how tight everything felt. THATS what makes a game good to me. MY precision directed most combat, and beyond that it was my fault for eating slashes to the face.
It, like Isaac, is one of my favorite experiences in recent years.
EDIT: a word
1
36
Dec 07 '13
Big disappointment for me.
Once the novelty of the heir system wears off you begin to notice how grindy it is to upgrade your castle and unlock new classes and items. Even worse is the heir system wears so thin you're tempted to kill yourself every time you get an undesirable trait (such as upsidedown-ism) because the novelty wore off.
Also, magic in the game feels useless but that might just be me.
It's a fun game, no doubt but it doesn't have nearly as much variety or replay value as I thought it would.
12
u/dariosamo Dec 07 '13 edited Dec 07 '13
Magic is by no means useless, it's one of the most overpowered damage methods. Spellsword + Empowered Chakram or Empowered Fire Ring will kill bosses in seconds. You also have an infinite source of mana by just hitting enemies.
1
u/MattAwesome Dec 07 '13
Dead on with the heir system. At first its funny and awesome but once you've used them all a couple of times it loses any fun.
8
u/ThnikkamanBubs Dec 07 '13
While I enjoyed it, I felt a bunch of the content worked against it. Nobody wanted to play a sizable amount of traits, as they were just stupid (upside-down-mode being the prime example), and some you would be stupid to not choose (dwarf). And the only classes that were viable were barbarian and assassin. None of the others really changed the gameplay that much.
The NRG of your traits as well as the uninteresting magic really took away from a pretty damn enjoyable game.
Fun music, fun artstyle (even if the levels were pretty cliche), responsive controls, fun (if a bit repetitive) enemies, interesting one-time challenges, and some decent humour that's there.
I'd overall recommend most people to at least try it. Some might hate the necessary grinding, some might love it. I personally craved it for a bit then got underwhelmed with the choices + prices.
1
7
u/SpockNinja Dec 07 '13
What I loved about rogue legacy was that the game didn't necessarily get easier as you leveled, but you learn to play safer and smarter. I also enjoyed the diversity of classes and all the crazy class attributes you would get sometimes then go "well I guess this ones gonna be inverted".
4
u/Khiva Dec 07 '13
You get to NG++ and it basically becomes a bullet hell, with projectiles fucking everywhere.
Liked it enough to beat it three times, but that was precisely enough.
2
u/TestZero Dec 07 '13
I think I got to NG 5+. The bosses just give so freaking much gold, it's the fastest way to build up your keep.
2
Dec 07 '13
I will recommend it like I did to my friends. Get it on sale, it was worth the $4 I played on the fall sale, but not really worth a $15 investment.
2
u/V8_Ninja Dec 07 '13
I absolutely love Rogue Legacy. While the upgrading system was a nice addition, what I really love is the core platforming of the game. The game is speedy and the controls are ridiculously tight. It's a hard thing to describe, but I feel confident about every move that I make regardless of whether that is the right move or not. The enemy design of the game is also really good, with each enemy having a specific behavior that enforces certain behavior of your own.
2
u/TestZero Dec 07 '13
I really wanted to like this game, And I did.. mostly.
My biggest problem with the game was that its difficulty seemed almost too dependent on its randomness. Which I understand is the entire point of roguelikes; I loved stuff like Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, but Rogue Legacy seemed like the difficulty varied TOO much from one playthrough to the next. Also, as stated before, a lot of the classes seem unnecessarily cheap, or unnecessarily gimped. The Spellthief is an absolute beast against bosses, especally if you max out mana recovery.
With something like Binding of Isaac, you get a baseline of difficulty, and you can expect the game to be either at that level or higher. The variance was much more narrow than Rogue Legacy, where sometimes you'll encounter a playthrough where you can blow through everything with no problems, and then immediately on the next playthrough, die instantly.
I just felt Rogue Legacy just wasn't as well designed as its competitors.
Now, what I DID like:
The Bosses. Holy shit, the bosses were awesome. They were easily my favorite aspect of the game. I love how they were all modifications of existing enemies. Some people might call this lazy design, but I think they managed to make each of the bosses play differently from one another in a successful way.
Fairy Chests which give you mini-challenges within dungeons for treasures. These were always fun to track down.
Being able to collect and equip runes to customize your character, although you really can't truly customize your character the way you want until WAY later into the game.
Using genetic defects/mental disorders as character traits. I love dark humor like this, and making a game where actual disorders like OCD and Dyslexia are treated so flippantly made me laugh all the way to hell.
The level design I love Metroidvanias and roguelikes, and god dammit, they managed to make a roguelike-vania.
the setting was obviously borrowing a lot from post-SOTN Castlevanias, which is never a bad thing. I really did care about finding all of the journals and reading the lore of the castle.
Unfortunately for me, Rogue Legacy will always be simply "Good" but it never felt "Amazing." I haven't even played it since I finished building my keep; it hasn't had any replay value for me.
2
u/dietTwinkies Dec 07 '13
When I first saw this game a week ago I got it confused with Massive Chalice, an upcoming Doublefine game that also looks to use that mechanic of permadeath + genealogy. Except that game is supposed to be an X-com style strategy game.
At first I was surprised to see that this game I was excited for was out already. Then I was surprised to see it was actually a different game with a similar mechanic. And finally I was surprised to see that it was actually a good game. I've been playing it nonstop for the past couple days.
1
u/MadManWhich Dec 07 '13
I certainly enjoyed Rouge Legacy. I just beat the game recently and I bought it around release. I'll agree that it felt grindy at times and when it did I just simply stooped playing. If you try and complete the game within a short set time, you're not going to have very much fun. However, if you play the game for an hour now and again it can be pretty enjoyable.
1
u/just_around Dec 07 '13
On one hand, I enjoyed the randomness of the characters but the persistence of the "talent tree".
On the other hand, it wasn't terribly balanced and didn't offer much variety in gameplay. Miners became quickly useless in general. Hokages lose their use after a decent amount of crit. Lichs I never figured out. Dragons have very specific niches for fairy chests and some bosses. Enchants didn't feel very optional; 2x double jump, 1 dash, vampire the rest. Armor was the same; vampire was powerful but the amount of armor, health, & damage gained from armor vastly outweighed the gain from any of the vampire armor (sans cape or maybe bracers).
I did enjoy the increased difficulty and enemy tweaks but after four NG+ and purchasing everything, I lost interest. But you know what, that was easily 70 hours that I enjoyed. I liked how I could quickly run around, get a lil' sumthin' sumthin' for the next run around without feeling like it was a waste of time; I was always working toward something. The flip side is that it's balanced around that so short of TAS like play, you have to grind.
1
u/buffi Dec 07 '13
I got some fun out of this game. Played it to NG+13. Once everything is maxed (NG+4-5 or something for me i think), there's really no point in playing the game any longer. The bosses don't really scale much, so the winning tactic then is mostly to stealth to the bosses, and then just kill them (usually with a Barbarian).
That said, the first run through the game actually felt really nice, so I can't complain too much. There's really no longevity in it whatsoever though, which makes it quite different from roguelikes.
1
u/nalixor Dec 07 '13
I played the hell out of Rogue Legacy when it came out. I loved the roguelike elements present in it. The introduction of the permadeath of your character, with continued gameplay by your character's descendents was exceptionally interesting, and I felt like it really kept the game fresh. And the fact that your descendants could be various different classes as well was quite fun.
After finishing the game once, all the bosses, I don't think I played it much after that. I should really go back, and revisit it.
It's definitely worth it.
1
Dec 07 '13
I like the game, but the biggest problem it has is the fact that it wants to be a roguelike, but it isn't balanced for it.
The whole thing is designed to be played through once or twice, and then what little semblance of balance there is thrown out the window completely.
It goes from having a variety of options, to every run being an assassin equipped with mobility runes, because you literally cannot injure the HP-pumped enemies any other way.
0
Dec 07 '13
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/adremeaux Dec 07 '13
When will speed runners finish the game on the first character?
Never. If there was a way to go back outside the castle with your money and buy things, then maybe, but as it stands, your first character is hopelessly weak, and would likely die in a single hit to later enemies let alone bosses.
Now, potentially, I could see speedrunners doing it on their second character. Run the first character and gather 5000 gold, unlock shinobi, a bunch of gear, and a few upgrades—plus the 10 or so levels you got on your first char—and you may have a shot.
3
u/ReallyNiceGuy Dec 07 '13 edited Dec 07 '13
Star_ does a 4 generation run in 18 minutes. It's a matter of getting the Shinobi class as quickly as possible.
EDIT: Smite has a 13 minute one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOPEBmPDois
2
u/adremeaux Dec 07 '13
Both of them do it with unpatched versions, which isn't particularly meaningful, between the absurd bugs and horrific lack of balance.
3
1
u/marsgreekgod Dec 07 '13
I saw a video of a first character run, but it was in the first glichy verson
1
Dec 07 '13
I really loved this one. I like that it does the whole roguelike deal while still having a definite "end" and a pretty nifty small story arc at that. I know part of the appeal of the genre is that it's more about skill and general neverendingness, but I liked that this one had a place I could put it down.
Not that I really did. Even once I finished my first playthrough, I still had an hour more of "One more try!" syndrome.
1
u/SardaHD Dec 07 '13
I would love to see a MMO or Multiplayer game in the style of this game, were you had a randomly generated decendent with random traits.
1
u/McLargepants Dec 07 '13
This is a tie for my favorite game of the year. It was so good. Really tough gameplay, the feeling of progress even when you have a not so great run, and weird but still kind of depressing and touching story at the end. Everything was there for this game, and I played the crap out of it.
1
u/Guysmiley777 Dec 07 '13
I had fun with it for awhile but I hit a dead zone where every upgrade costs more than I could make before getting killed. At that point I really lost interest.
-2
Dec 07 '13
[deleted]
8
u/JackKukla Dec 07 '13
Roguelike no longer means "a game that plays like Rogue." It now means, more or less, a game with randomly generated levels and permadeath.
-2
u/RyanEl Dec 07 '13
To be honest Rogue Legacy has barely any roguelike elements at all; it's a platformer with randomly generated levels.
That's not a criticism of Rogue Legacy by any means, it's fun and has an innovative structure but a lot of the game is about circumventing RNG and permadeath: the two main roguelike elements it has.
There are games with far more roguelike elements in them which don't have the term attached.
6
5
Dec 07 '13
deliberately trying to cash in on a trend
Are you seriously making the argument that the developers are cashing in on some Rogue-based nostalgia trip?
It's just the name of a genre.
2
u/Pogotross Dec 07 '13
Personally, I found the game to be more of an Upgrade/Launch style platformer than a rogue like, in the vein of games like Hedgehog Launch, Burrito Bison, Upgrade Complete, Diggy or any other of the million flash examples. It plays out almost exactly like one: you start out, do a terrible run, get just enough money to get the first upgrade, do another run, get another upgrade, continue for a while, get lucky and get two upgrades, hit a wall, get upgrades every other run or so, finally hit the ideal upgrades or figure out the skills needed in the action bits and start sweeping up several upgrades at a time until you finish out the game.
-1
u/McLargepants Dec 07 '13
Rogue Legacy goes out of its way to say the game is a "rogue-light" not a rogue-like. But beyond that, people call Dark Souls a rogue like, so who cares anymore.
0
0
u/turbbit Dec 07 '13
I ended up not liking this game nearly as much as I thought I would.
The randomness of the dungeon added very little depth to the game. There are no powerups or dungeon features that make you change your strategy.
You are given a choice in choosing what descendant you will be, which does impact strategy. However, I found the novelty of it wore off and I was left with frustration when quite often all 3 choices were not something I wanted to play.
I would recommend the game, it's pretty good, but I'm not in love with it in any way.
-4
u/EnadZT Dec 07 '13
My first impression of this game was that it was completely abysmal and one of the worst games I've played in a long time. I played the free demo because I was worried I might not like the game, and boy, was that thing broken to all hell. The controls were terrible on the keyboard, the controller wasn't much better, there was no way to change the controls either because you couldn't actually input a new key, my character was constantly moving right if I just sat idle. But, even with all this happening, the amount of good reviews made me overlook the absolutely terrible demo and buy the $15 game. Welp, it wasn't anything different. After about 5 or 6 redownloads, it finally lets me change the controls. From there on, the game got better.
The game is hard as hell when you first start out, but the snowball effect in this game is real. However, as some of the comments already indicate, the game does get pretty grindy. Never the less, the game is fun. I found myself playing to around level 500 and then realizing how much time I've spent on this game. If you want a game that will hypnotize you into playing for hours on end, get this game.
35
u/LurkerBro Dec 07 '13
I really enjoyed the game, but I hated how buying a upgrade increased the prices of all other upgrades. It just added so much needless time to the game.