Rogue Legacy First Impressions

One of the first things I ever posted about when I started this blog effort was this sort of Roguelike game called The Binding of Isaac, and I gushed a hell of a lot over that one.  But after having burnt myself out hard on that, finally something has come along to fulfil my randomly generate dungeon needs.

Rogue Legacy is a 2D Metroidvania-esque Roguelike game that recently got released on Steam.  I've only really started playing, but from what I can tell the aim of the game is to explore the randomly generated castle and kill a bunch of bosses so you can go fight the big bad behind a huge gold door and then win the game.

You play as a knight who at the start is killed quite easily by pretty much everything inside the castle and when you die you have to start over completely from scratch, so if your hoping to get to that final boss then you really have to pull your socks up and show some Metroidvania skills.

As you play you find gold that you can use to by equipment and upgrades with at a hub screen before you start a run with each new knight.   You may be thinking this is an easy game since you could just spam a bunch of shit runs to get gold, beef yourself up and do the game in one shot but that is not the case.

Upon leaving the hub area you have to give a dude at the gate all of the money you are holding, so if you want an expensive upgrade you have to get the money for it all in one go.  It may sound like an annoying system but it's actually a really cool way to keep the game challenging, but gold drops so easily that it never feels like bullshit to build up the hundreds of gold you might need for those upgrades. 

The final cool feature I want to touch on is the character select screen after being killed in the castle.

You get a choice of 3 knights that have a different class and spell, but the most interesting thing is the trait of your knight.  Traits are special buffs or debuffs that each knight gets given at random and they can have drastic effects on your run.  For example, I was given a knight with the colourblind trait so the entire game was in black and white while I was playing with that character.  I have one friend who had a knight with far sightedness which made his screen blurry and another who had an exaggeration trait where the damage numbers would read huge values instead of the actual ones.  The traits are not only pretty funny but they have a cool effect on the game play that make sure every knight feels a little different each time.

So that's it for now, I'm going to go and play a ton more of this, and with the steam sale still in full swing I'd suggest picking it up while you can get a bit of a discount on it.  It's also extremely accessible so if you've never played a Roguelike and the genre looks a bit intimidating to you, then give this a go, you'll have a ton of fun even if you suck at it.