Rogue Legacy Review (kan)
Another indie game with a lot of potential wasted because the developers focus their efforts on the 1% of players that want to play the game for 1000 hours that are the most vocal members of the community.
Game has absolutely no respect for the player's time. The most obvious way in this shows itself is how the meta progression slows down to a crawl very quickly.
The roguelike system is also used to screw you over with RNG and make you waste time, rather than for its positive aspects of variability and allowing powerful builds. Classes, relics and traits are extremely unbalanced, so in most of the runs you feel like you're very handicapped to beat the tough bosses. When all you'll be getting out of the run is some gold that will let you buy a 0.1% power boost, it all feels like a massive waste of time.
The design has so many flaws that seem obvious, but it's clear the devs didn't care because the community has an attitude of "just play for 100 hours and you'll figure out how to deal with anything".
The enemy design is just bad. Some monsters are so easy they pose 0 challenge and have no reason to even exist, others jump at you from off-screen and hit you before you have time to react. Sometimes enemy AI just stands there and let you kill them, or get stuck attacking into a wall. Movesets are inconsistent, like the Maiden enemies who only charge up to a ledge and not past it, except when they sometimes decide to just ignore that and go flying.
Room design is also bad and the difficulty varies too much. A few rooms seem impossible to get through without being hit.
Health pick up drops are also so random and unreliable that the best rune set up is to take all the healing runes, which is obviously bad for variety. It seems really easy to make healing more steady, like less hp per drop but more drops, or increasing the odds everytime you don't get healing. The devs didn't bother.
It looks like the devs caved in a bit and did some half-assed "House Rules" to make the game more accessible, but again just failed to understand the community beyond the hardcore players. It's full of "acessiblity" options that feel like they remove the point of even playing a game like this, like being able to literally fly and skip all the platforming, or being able to completely remove contact damage. But it's also missing obvious accessibility options like just being able to increase gold gain and progress more quickly, or more reliable healing.
There's literally no reason to play this over Dead Cells or Hades.