izigame.me

I wish I could rate this just okay or so-so. Rogue Legacy 2 certainly has more than the original Rogue Legacy, but it's not necessarily more GOOD. The more I play it, the more I am led to believe that the developers were never entirely sure what lightning in a bottle they captured that made the first installment so successful, and as a result have simply dialed up everything to 11 hoping that something will stick. There's more classes, weapons, skills, enemies, etc., but there's ten times the amount of garbage you will have to deal with experiencing it.
The grind is obviously part of the experience of this game, and is put front-and-center with the iterative upgrades you buy after each run attempt, but feels orders of magnitude worse than the previous title. The risk-reward proposition in this game is abysmal. The game will highly discourage you from taking any risks and instead you will quickly find that you will amass much more treasure and experience by steamrolling lower-difficulty areas over and over rather than attempting somewhere more challenging, where you will eventually be killed in two or three hits. Damage can come from anywhere, and projectiles often move faster than you can react, with projectiles or traps coming from offscreen to whittle a third of your health down after you've already scoped out your plan for things on the screen. The end result is often expending your mechanical resources of an extra jump or dash to cleanly eliminate what is on screen, but now that you air in midair and have those mechanics disabled until you touch down, you can easily be tagged by new things that have entered the screen after executing your plan. Normally having to react to things is such a standard part of video games that it seems almost ridiculous to mention something like this at all, but it will happen to you SO MUCH in RL2 that it bears mention. You WILL be tagged by things coming from offscreen, you WILL be hit by attacks that make no sense, and you WILL die to BS, over and over again. To some people, this grind can be exciting, as it becomes more akin to gambling, hoping to get lucky and not spin bankrupt rather than outplaying the enemies, but to me I find it tedious.
Enemy telegraphs in this game are abysmal, and I don't mean in the "enemy makes a windup motion and then you react" sense. I mean, an enemy will clearly show that they are executing some sort of attack, but instead of it being something you can safely react to or learn from, it will suddenly be a fast-moving projectile that will shoot through walls to hit you. Why does an enemy who only appears to have a melee weapon have an attack like this? Why do some projectiles go through walls and others don't? There's dozens of overengineered mechanics in this game ranging from several kinds of weights and how they affect what you can pick up without ruining your max health, down to several currencies, bonuses, debuffs, and all these things which should really just be taking a backseat to the hack and slash mechanics. I doubt many players care that their new armor gives them plus seventeen smeerps instead of fifteen, when the areas you want to explore will still kill you in three hits. The upgrades are so incrementally tiny, it feels like garbage even sinking points into any of them at all.
There's simply so much crammed into this game that don't strictly make it better that bothers me. There's lore books shoehorned in in the most hamfisted manner, sidequests which are vague enough that even when you know exactly what a riddle is referring to, you will still fail because you were standing two inches too far away to trigger a secret door. Just google this stuff, it's legitimately not worth trying to solve the riddles, especially since it just leads to more ways to obtain more nonsense currencies that let you buy more tiny upgrades, seriously, sometimes simplicity is better.
Multiple runs in this game are tiring and overtly repetitive, something that is not good for a roguelite or any game that has "rogue" so brazenly spotlit in the title. I want to experience all this game has to offer but this gameplay loop is trying my patience and you can get about triple the dopamine per run in many other similar roguelites. RL2 isn't bad, it's not great, and it really is just about as okay as RL1, with a more convoluted path to the golden gameplay loop that seems to take the backseat. Sometimes simplicity is best, and I honestly feel stripping about 50% of the stuff from this game would make it objectively a more fun experience.