Game review: Rogue Legacy for PS Vita

I wanted to like Rogue Legacy, but I haven’t had much fun with it. At first, I thought that maybe I needed to invest a bit of time into upgrades and it would become fun, kind of like with Prototype, where extra powers make roaming the city a joy. But even after two days straight of buying upgrades and unlocking all the other character classes, I’m still not having fun.

I imagine a meeting at the studio behind this game, and one of the programmers said something like, “You know what the best part of those old NES RPGs was? The endless hours of forced grinding before you could work up the skills to take on the boss.” I wonder why no one said, “Uh, dude, grinding is a chore that most people hate.” But no, apparently a lot of people think grinding is awesome, and so here’s a whole game devoted to grinding one generation of heroes and heroines to death so the next generation will have the money to pay for more stuff. Each time you enter the castle, whatever funds you don’t spend get taken away, so hey, might as well shop between the looting and pillaging, right?

It’s a shame that none of this feels fun to me because the game has a lot of good points that should please me. The controls are simple. There’s a ton of enemy types to keep things from getting stale. (at least initially, that is. I’ll come back to this.) The music is good, and the graphics are crisp and bright.

But combat is a chore no matter what class I play, and no matter what level I reach. Part of it has to do with the number of enemies who shoot through walls and begin attacking long before I ever see them. Part of it is in the wimpy nature of every sword, even after upgrading the damage. There’s no sense of progression in that it takes roughly the same number of swings to kill bad guys no matter what sword I use or how much I upgrade my stats. And the thing is, the cost of upgrades becomes ridiculously expensive pretty quickly. So I might have several runs where I can’t afford to upgrade anything after dying and have to give up my money to Charon, the castle guard, before restarting a new level. I later upgraded one stat so he only took half my gold, but it’s still frustrating and it cost me a shit ton of gold just to upgrade five levels and max that stat out.

I reached a point tonight after having beaten the first two bosses where I realized, at no time was I thinking about how much fun I was having. I wasn’t even mad or annoyed. I was just thinking, “Okay, if I can get X amount of gold, I’ll upgrade this stat X number of times.” There was no endpoint to this accounting. I was just thinking about the math to upgrade various skills. Once I realized that and I recognized how little fun I was having even on good runs through the castle, I decided to take a run at the third boss again. But despite having upgraded my sword 25 levels and having 500 hit points, I still didn’t feel any more capable than I did back at the start of the game. It wasn’t just the boss making me feel underwhelmed. Despite all those upgrades, the minions of the Maya area felt as tough as they had when I first entered the area on day one. And that sucks.

Really, what is the point of all this stat dumping and gold hoarding when it all feels pretty fucking useless? When I dump that much money into upgrading weapon damage, I want that sword to feel EPIC, not wimpy. If I buy the supa-dupa armor, I want it to feel like it’s absorbing some of the damage, and the best armor I unlocked feels about as useless as tissue paper mache cosplay.

The player character classes are all the same avatar, but with slightly different heads. The miner has a light on his (or her) head, the hokage has a headband, and the archmage has a beard. (Whether male or female, because all magi have beards, ho ho ho. SIGH.) The different offspring might have dwarfism or giantism, meaning the model is stretched or condensed. But they all walk like they’re doing the Can-can, and they all hold their sword out in front of them like a baby waving a flag. One of the classes forgoes carrying the sword, but still holds his arm out, so he looks like a German goose stepping and saluting Hitler. I suppose it’s a minor complaint, but if you spent all this time making up these different enemies, why not invest a little more time making different models for the various player classes?

The other thing that didn’t wow me is how the offspring all have randomly generated traits, about half of which made the game less fun to play. A character might be color blind, so the game is in black and white, making it harder to see incoming enemy fire. Or they might be near or far-sighted, making the character blurry. Or they might be really skinny, so every hit throws them a long way. Or they might have dementia, meaning you can’t look at the map.

There are classes like dwarfism that supposedly unlock secret tunnels in the castle, but 9 times out of 10, if I selected a dwarf, the castle that got generated that round had no tunnels. But the moment I switched back to a normal sized character, there were tunnels all over the next castle. I’m not even sure why this seemed like a good idea. The upgraded knave can turn into smoke, but can’t go through the tunnels. The hokage can “flash” across the screen, but no pass through a wall. So a lot of the time, a castle design feels like it’s punishing you for not having the right class, and since you only get three character to choose from in each round, often the one that might be right for a given castle wasn’t a choice.

Then there’s the traits that are just plain useless and added nothing to the game. Characters have ADHD, so they “move faster” (I couldn’t really tell much difference in their speed and normal characters in the same class) Or they might have trouble telling people apart. Or they might be gay, or they might have dyslexia, so the journal entries get jumbled. Or they might have irritable bowel syndrome so they fart a lot when they jump. It’s not even good for a laugh the first time a character farts, so by the time I’ve heard it a hundred times in the same run, it’s mind numbingly tedious.

The enemies start off having a lot of variety, and that’s good in that you never quite know what you’re going to get from one level to the next. But after playing through all four areas in the same runs, I began to notice how many enemies were the same model with a different color scheme and increased size. All that increase in size meant was that they shot more ammo, or bigger ammo, and that I’d need more swings to take them down, meaning I’d lose a lot of hit points no matter what I did.

There are times when I might give up in the middle of a game and decide to YouTube the rest because I want to see what I’m missing. But in this case, I just don’t care. It can’t be said that I didn’t give it enough time for a fair judgement, because after 80 hours, I should be able to decide whether I like something or not. What it comes down to is, in all those 80 hours, I can only recall a few minutes in random places where I wasn’t thinking how very tedious and dull this game is.

With all that said, it might be surprising that I’m giving Rogue Legacy 3 stars. But it’s not a broken game, and I don’t hate it. I never felt angry with the controls, or even the cheap enemy tactics. I just never felt anything positive either. Your mileage may vary, and this might be the ultimate in dungeon crawling fun for you. But I’d much rather go back to playing Spelunky. The gimmick of continuing each dungeon crawl with your ancestor’s assets sounded fun in theory, but the nickel-and-diming bullshit in the upgrades menus kills any sense of progression or fun for me. So I’m deleting this from my Vita to make room for something that doesn’t bore me so completely.