Author: Josh Bycer

Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I'm also the author of the "Game Design Deep Dive" series and "20 Essential Games to Study"

Rogue Legacy 2 is a Roguelite Return

THE ORIGINAL ROGUELITE

Rogue Legacy is the game that popularized what would become the sub-genre known as “roguelite” — the idea of having a focus on persistence as progression in a roguelike. Since its release, the roguelike and lite genres have blown up across the board. With all these new flavors, Rogue Legacy 2 has recently left early access and now asks the question: can the original roguelite show these newcomers some new tricks?

The Liter Side

The basic gameplay of the original returns with a new story. A Kingdom has fallen to a mysterious corruption, the guardians have been taken over by a strange force, and you once again sign away your life and your descendants to Charon to figure out what’s going on. The upgraded visuals are impressive, with improved lighting that makes everything pop.

If you missed the first one, the progression of the game comes in the form of your estate/castle. Gold, earned by killing enemies and finding treasure chests can be used after a run to add additions to your castle. These additions become progressively more expensive, but they will unlock new classes, raise stats, add new quality of life features, and more.

In runs, you can find blueprints that can be used to acquire new equipment pieces with a set bonus for wearing them all. Unlike the first game, your major improvements this time come in the form of heirlooms that are placed in each biome. Once unlocked, they stay active for the rest of the game. Runes, that offer passive bonuses, are still locked to completing a variety of puzzles and mini challenges throughout the world. A new unlock is in the form of “scars” which are bonus challenges whose resources can be used to unlock additional features and boost your stats even higher. The roguelite nature of Rogue Legacy 2 is on full display, and I can just see people attempting level 1 challenges or “low level” runs.

the persistence is back in full force

A new resource “resolve” acts as a reserve used to equip relics that provide a variety of passive bonuses that can be found in a run. Once your resolve gets less than 100, further drains will reduce your max health. These relics can be worth it and with the right ones can easily break a run.

Class diversity has been given a facelift with more classes, more special powers, and of course, more whacky traits. The traits were a big part of the original’s charm, with characters having traits that affect their run but can also earn you more gold for taking them.

Everything about Rogue Legacy 2 brings back the charm of the original, but it also brings back the issues I had as well.

Floaty Fighting

Of the variety of action roguelikes I’ve played, both Rogue Legacies feel the most inconsistent in terms of movement and combat for several reasons.

While it may not look like it, there are aspects of bullet hell in both games in how you must dodge attacks. Many enemies can launch all varieties of projectiles at you, some that track, some that can go through walls, etc. One of the biggest annoyances with the game is the lack of standardized alerts about oncoming attacks.

Some attacks the game will warn you that the enemy is about to do them, others they won’t. The same goes for incoming projectiles off-screen — some of them the game will let you know, other times you’ll get hit with no warning. It becomes very frustrating when you are trying to keep track of things and you can have three different projectiles and no way to tell how they behave. You have no invincibility frames while dashing (only one class gets an I-frame dodge), and it’s very common to have a situation where dodging one attack puts you right in front of another.

The enemy physics is one of the most frustrating aspects of the game, to the point that I’m glad that there is an assist option to disable damage when coming in contact. Many classes have attacks that don’t push the enemy back when you hit them. This can lead to issues of enemies that you’re trying to attack, and they just fly or dash straight into you and do damage. For classes that can crit off dash attacks, it is far too risky to use this move on the later areas as you’re increasing the chance of you taking more damage.

Since enemies don’t respond to attacks, you can dodge all their projectiles, get into melee range and start hitting, and they’ll launch an attack with no tell and hit you without any means of dodging. Many of my deaths came from situations where it felt like the game was just not giving me a way to succeed — rooms where projectiles come from all angles, with enemies of varying tells, that all hit like a truck if I run into them or their attacks. I found that range attacks can break the difficulty in a lot of the later areas simply by not having to try and duck and weave around projectiles while trying to hit enemies.

The Daily Grind

Rogue Legacy 2 is certainly a roguelite and is by far one of the most grind-heavy out there. Every form of progression will take time to gather the necessary resources to upgrade. As with the first game, the general positioning and difficulty of the biomes don’t change, which means that your best way of grinding resources is to always go to the hardest area you can in order to maximize the gold you find. Just like with the first game, and with roguelites in general, you’re going to have a lot of throwaway runs that are just there to grind resources before having your “serious runs.”

skill is still the primary factor in winning fights

The biggest hurdle to progress much like the first game is just how tanky the bosses are. Expect to spend a lot of minutes dodging the same patterns as you whittle down their health bars. A new feature that allows you to gain bonus damage requires you to hunt down clues in each biome. Damage is the most important stat, as killing enemies fast prevents them from firing back at you obviously. Because the cost of all upgrades gets progressively more expensive as you spend, it’s very easy to make things harder for you by getting upgrades that aren’t directly helping you but increasing the cost of everything else (the game has been patched with a recommended upgrade path). For people who do finish the game, there is an extensive array of post-game content and progressive difficulty if you really want to keep the rogue-lite-ness going.

A Family Reunion

Rogue Legacy 2 is the bigger, better-looking version of the first game. If you enjoyed the first game through and through, this is certainly more to love. If you were hoping for some refinements to the design and pain points, then this action family tree simulator still has some thorns to deal with. This is still the quintessential roguelite on the market and a must-play for fans of the original.

This was played with a press key provided by the publisher

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Indie Dev Showcase 5/26/22

Each indie dev showcase highlights the developer-submitted games and demos we check out for our Wednesday night streams. If you would like to submit a game for a future one please reach out.

The Indie Dev Showcase 5/18/22

The indie showcases highlight the developer submitted games and demos I play for Game-Wisdom. Please reach out if you would like me to play your game.

Trek to Yomi Review

Trek to Yomi just came out a few weeks ago and I went through it on stream, and while it certainly had style, the substance was lacking.

The Weekly Indie Dev Showcase

The latest indie dev showcase, where I play developer submitted games and demos over on game-wisdom. If you would like to submit a game for a future piece, please get in touch.

A Talk With Studio Centurion on Line War

For this interview, I spoke with Christian and Stefan of Studio Centurion to discuss their game Line War, and how they’re trying to build a new kind of RTS game that focuses on strategy as opposed to micro. We spoke about how the game came about, thoughts on RTS gameplay, and more.

Indie Dev Showcase (week of 5/4/22)

The indie showcases highlight the many dev-submitted games and demos play on Game-Wisdom. If you would like to submit a game for a future piece please reach out.

Revita Takes a Gamble on Story and Difficulty

Revita is another action roguelike to come out of early access recently. And while it does feel like a greatest hits collection of action roguelike mechanics, the game’s principal twist does separate it from the pack but does so in a polarizing way.

Rebirth

The story of the game follows a young boy who keeps waking up in a mysterious tower that he is forced to climb. Standing in his way are various monsters and creatures that represent the stages of grief, hinting at some earth-shattering secrets going on. The basic gameplay involves running, jumping, shooting, and dodging enemy attacks on procedurally generated floors. While the game features set room layouts, what enemies can spawn is entirely random per area/biome.

As with any action roguelike, you’re going to find a number of items that can change how your character behaves and do damage. The first twist of the game is that your health is also your currency. Shops, shrines, treasure chests, and other things will require you to sacrifice your health. As you kill enemies, you’ll accumulate souls that can be transformed into more health or give you more of a health pool.

The sheer number of unlockables is extensive, and I haven’t seen a pool like this since The Binding of Isaac. The different varieties of items can lead to crazy runs, but your skill is still going to be the main factor. As you play through the game, progressive difficulty unlocks will increase the difficulty of runs and add in new modifiers to deal with. Where the game goes with this is somewhat original for the action roguelike genre.

A Difficult Story

For most games, the progressive difficulty is simply there for expert players who are done with the story and just want to keep pushing up the challenge. With Revita, the difficulty is part of the story. Once you get to difficulty level 5, the game will challenge you to perform a specific task to move the story along and unlock even more difficulties and levels to play. This is like The Binding of Isaac which had its share of secrets and additional content. However, you cannot even get anything that would be considered a real ending without raising up the difficulty.Revita the progressive difficulty provides a lot of replay value for people who want the challenge

For those that do manage this task, they will find even more difficulty levels, secrets, and harder challenges to go after. At the time of writing this review, the developer has changed the conditionals for the first set of challenges, which is good due to their difficulty and RNG messing with it. However, if you find that unlock to be difficult, the game has far more in store, and while this does leave the game with plenty under the surface to find, I don’t know how many people are going to be motivated this way.

Pushing Through the Pain

Revita reminds me a little bit of Spelunky 2 and how there is more going on for expert players than there is for casual/core ones. While it does feel nice to know that there is a lot more to this game for someone like me, I do question if there’s enough to motivate someone to make the trek up the difficulty ladder.

The problem is that unlocking the many secrets to Revita is not just about getting good at the game, but also figuring out the conditions for its secrets and being able to execute it with randomly chosen items showing up each run. The base game, or level 0 of difficulty, is on the easy side compared to other games in the genre. If someone plays, beats the game and thinks that is it, they’re going to leave disappointed.

Even with the number of difficulty settings that you can unlock, and there are plenty, the base path through doesn’t feel like there is enough variance in the same ways as Hades or The Binding of Isaac. As with Hades, your starting weapon dictates a lot about how you’re going to be playing over the run. However, where Hades has the different god buffs, or The Binding of Isaac has items that radically change your build, Revita doesn’t have that many that would be considered that run-affecting. In total, there are five main biomes, and two variants of two of them that you will do per run. I’ve found that I was relying on the same basic strategies each run and that they were working.

From an expert standpoint, trying to get through challenges hitless can be frustrating as screen shaking, the camera zooms, and the bullet physics themselves can make it hard to gauge dodging. The bullet physics in the game varies from linear directions to those that have their own simulated physics to them. There were times due to the rng of how bullets behaved that there didn’t seem to be a safe way to dodge them.

One of the more annoying aspects of Revita’s progressive difficulty is that several levels introduce elements that increase the duration of the runs. By the time I was hitting level 10+, a single run would take about an hour, with the combination of the lack of variance, started to wear thin for me. I think I would have preferred fewer difficulty settings but make their differences more pronounced. Some, like increased bullet spawn and enemy speed were a big deal, but it took until shard 14 before I started to see more interesting ones that affected things.

Continuing the Cycle

Revita has a lot of charm to it, and the game makes use of a variety of action roguelike mechanics and systems. If you’re hoping for an example that radically changes the formula in the same way as Hades did, then this game doesn’t go that far. If you’re a veteran of the genre looking for another challenge to dive, or climb, into, then this is a solid entry for the year.

This was played with a press key provided by the developer.

If you enjoyed this story, consider joining the Game-Wisdom Discord channel. It’s open to everyone.

Even More Indie Games to Showcase

With all the indie games I play these days, I tend to have to double up with my showcase videos I edit this week. This means more indie games for you to check out.

Indie Game Showcase

It’s time for another indie game showcase, highlighting the many dev submitted games and demos I play . If you would like to submit a game for a future piece please reach out.

0:00 Cascade Cafe

1:54 Project Solace

3:58 Weaving Tides

6:33 Super Sami Roll

8:24 Godless

10:15 A Tale of Synapse The Chaos Theories

Shadow Warrior 3 Slices and Dices Its Predecessor

Wang’s Revenge

Shadow Warrior has come a long way since its original release in the 90’s, and then a reboot in the 2010’s. Violent, over-the-top, and crude, are some of the words you could describe the series. When studio Flying Wild Hog took over development, we saw games that attempted to mirror the FPS at the time. Shadow Warrior 2 felt like an extension of the looter shooter aspect of Borderlands and for me was an underrated hit. Now with Shadow Warrior 3 we have a great, albeit not that memorable third game in the trilogy.

Wang Chung

Our story finds the infamous loudmouth Lo Wang depressed after freeing a dragon at the end of the second game that has led to the apocalypse. Without any other option, he must team up with his nemesis Zilla to make one last play at saving the earth, and making as many references, “wang” jokes, and cursing as possible.

Right off the bat, there is good and bad news about Shadow Warrior 3. With this iteration, the developers clearly have been playing Doom Eternal and studied the idea of “push forward” combat. Wang is as agile as ever with the ability to dash, wall-run, and double jump around arenas. There is only one ammo type and whatever gun you are currently holding will get pickups. Shooting enemies will make them drop health, using your katana to kill them will make them drop ammo. You can also use your chi blast to send enemies into obstacles.

The idea of turning combat encounters into playgrounds of death has been made fully realized in Shadow Warrior 3. There are always explosive barrels ready to be shot at to cause area damage. Many areas feature environmental hazards like buzzsaws that can be turned on to deliver quick kills to even the strongest of enemies.

Like Doom, you can perform glory kills on enemies to instantly kill them, but there are two differences. Your ability to finish off enemies must be charged up by collecting orbs off other enemies, and there are three tiers of charge that correspond to the different enemy types. When you finish off a larger enemy, you get the same cutscene each time and get a limited-time exclusive weapon that you can use to turn the tide of combat. The gunplay in Shadow Warrior 3 is on point, with every weapon sounding meaty, delivering all manner of death, and can be upgraded using upgrade orbs found or unlocked by completing challenges.

This all sounds great and would put Shadow Warrior 3 on equal footing with some of the better FPS released in the last few years, however, there are a few things missing that could be a dealbreaker.

Sliced Away Systems

One of the major aspects that made Shadow Warrior 2 so different was the integration of looter-shooter aspects from games like Borderlands, and it turned the game into an almost FPS Action RPG. I found it compelling, not without some missteps in terms of itemization, but something I wanted to see the developers iterate on. Unfortunately, all those systems have been removed from Shadow Warrior 3 and the game feels more in line with the first game.

Gone are the variety of weapons, larger and more open areas, multiple upgrade routes, and quests. Instead, you’re going to get a linear 5–8-hour long game. Don’t get me wrong, the gunplay here is fantastic with a lot of entertaining arenas, but it comes at the removal of so many systems. If you didn’t like Shadow Warrior 2 for being filled with too many elements, then you’re going to enjoy this one.

One thing that is clearly different is the writing and may leave old and new fans a bit polarized.

#writing

One of the common criticisms of Shadow Warrior as a brand has been its depiction of Asian stereotypes and the low-brow humor, with of course the main character being named “Lo Wang.” For the third game, the developers are trying to square that circle by trying to keep the humor and remove the stereotypes. To wit, they have replaced the voice actor of the previous games with Mike Moh and the writing has been cleaned up of some of the lower hanging jokes from previous games.

Mike does a good job, but the updated writing I feel fails him. Instead of finding new jokes, the game really leans into toilet humor and dated references a lot more than I remember from Shadow Warrior 2. The quips Lo makes during combat get recycled fast. The game does have its heartwarming moments, but if you are offended/annoyed by toilet humor, you’re not going to like this game. Part of the problem is that there are fewer characters for Lo to interact with this time around, so the idea of having a “Dante-like” protagonist is lost when most of Lo’s conversations are with himself.

Shadow Dancing

Shadow Warrior 3 is an FPS that works with great gunplay, but I feel that this is a game that doesn’t do enough to stand out from the crowd and may be largely forgotten by the end of the year. You’re not going to be playing this one for a sprawling multi-hour epic, but a bite-sized thrill ride of guns, gore, profanity, and slashing. While not as ambitious as 2, Shadow Warrior 3 is a great weekend game for those looking to get their Doom Eternal fix with a more vocal hero.

This was played with a press key provided by the developer.

If you enjoyed this story, consider joining the Game-Wisdom Discord channel. It’s open to everyone.

Talking Terrorbane and Unconventional Adventure Games With Bit Nine Studios

For this podcast interview, I spoke with Andrea, Matteo, and Luca who are the team behind the recently released adventure game Terrorbane. We spoke about creating an unconventional adventure game, what gamedev is like in Italy and much more.

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