izigame.me

Definitely better than the original rogue legacy in many ways, but it becomes incredibly and frustratingly annoying that when you finish doing a full clear of each area over the course of 30+ minutes, you are only be able to buy a few upgrades at best from the skill tree afterwards. And that is also if everything goes to plan, meaning that most of your runs will only be giving you a choice of upgrading 1 measly little stat at the end of it, or if you can even afford to do that. The upgrades available to you at the end of the game only give you a tiny little stat boosts, so you will need to do many 30+ minute runs to build them up to something more useful.
I enjoyed it a lot at the beginning, and purposely experimented with all the classes and options available to me. But by the end of it, I found my self re-rolling till I got what I thought was the best class with no negative traits, as it was not worth the extra effort if they had some horrible gimmick tied to them. I was basically given two choices. One, grind out the boss I was stuck on till I perfected my strategy against them, or two, grind out runs until I scraped enough upgrades together till I thought that I could maybe do a little bit more damage against said boss next time, and repeat back to my two choices.
The movement in this game is okayish I suppose, just wish I had some other things to work with such a fast fall button so that I don't just watch the projectile fly directly into me and perfectly in my dashing path meaning that I will inevitably be hit by it. And another thing that annoys me is not being able to immediately interrupt my dash as I found my self constantly taking damage because I would attempt to dash away from something too close to an enemy and not be able to stop my self instantly and die as a result. I know a lot of this just boils down to "git gud," but I don't know, just feels like there needed to be something more.
There is a certain part of the game where you have to climb up a tower each and every time you want to try and fight one of the bosses, which took me probably like 10 minutes per attempt. I would be fine with this if getting up the tower wasn't such a pain. You have to perform not-so perfectly timed spin kicks to parkour your way up the tower (oh yeah they got rid of the down sword swipe thing that was in the previous game and replaced it with a much more gimmicky and harder to use spin kick instead, great idea right guys???), which isn't very forgiving as wait too long, and you'll get hit and lose your progress on that section of the parkour. Go too early and you'll miss it, get hit and lose your progress on that section again. Its similar to the cuphead parry mechanic, but the difference is that you have to do it a hell of a lot more compared to cuphead (but im looking at you king dice...).
But this tower also decides to switch it with what you need to do to go up with the other mechanic, dashing. This one is at least a bit more forgiving so its okay. But if you go too high or too low, then you get to watch your self fall downwards as you are only given one dash to work with unless you equip very specific runes or find relics that give you more dashes. And yes, this is another "git gud," moment, but I prefer to at least be given the chance to recover from my mistakes instead of having to complete the entire thing in one smooth motion.
Might I add that there is also enemies in these parkour sections? So then it ends up being either complete the entire thing in 1 smooth motion and dodge the enemy along the way, or get hit by the enemy who'll knock you off, making you teleport back to where you started, and requires you to now wait for the aggro enemy to slowly make its way over to you, so that you can kill it and attempt to complete the parkour again. There is also many parkour sections to go through. And the boss at the top is also significantly harder than any other boss you would have fought so far. This tested my patience greatly. If you could like hold out the spin kick so that it'll instantly be used as you approach something spin-kick-able, then this would of been completely fine with me. There is an accessibility setting where you can turn on flying to completely dodge all of this parkour, but that did not sit right with me using that. But I did abuse relics that gave me flight.
Some classes also are just straight up garbage. A lot of the classes have some gimmick where they can't move around fluently whilst attacking which is just terrible in a game about dodging. This is also just another "git gud," moment but it's not like there is any real incentive to learning to get good at these classes when there is other classes that can move around and just perform better in general. Like the archer for example, can't move while aiming unless, you jump around stupidly then you sorta can, only for your arrow to do the same damage a sword or something else would do. Then there is some magic class that also completely freezes in place for a good second or two and there is no counter play to this apart from just good positioning. And still not even worth it as you will not be constantly in the scenario where you can actually put your self in a good position. I suppose there was some alright classes that are actually workable with, such as the gunslinger and some person with a flying spear thing, but it is still annoying that you lose movement in the game about moving around enemies and projectiles.
I would look past all of these negatives if the gold gain wasn't terrible. They have a system in place where the more upgrades you buy, the more expensive the rest of the upgrades become, which isn't so bad if gold was worth more. You are basically forced to use negative traits to make progress in the skill tree as by the end of my game, they were giving me 400% more gold gain versus the base like 10% gold gain I had on my regular classes with regular traits. And even with this 400% gold gain, the negative traits were such a high skill ceiling that I wouldn't last long enough to make a big enough impact with them. One of the negative traits is a 1 shot, 1 death mechanic which I didn't do too well with. Another one is vegetarian which I can actually work around as its not totally unforgiving (until you break an object and the consumable you are suppose to dodge spawns inside you, instantly damaging you). Then there is one where only crits deal damage. This is extremely annoying to use as some classes can crit easily, whilst others have to go hell and back to get crits. A lot of them involve dashing, a mechanic where I WISH you could just cancel at anytime as I just love dashing into my enemy to try and deal crit damage to them but instead just deal damage to me only instead because I CAN NOT STOP MY SELF FROM DASHING INTO THE ENEMY.
At the end of the game, I was very sick of playing this. The gold grind just became too much, so I just relied on constantly grinding out attempts on the bosses. I killed the second to last boss and that was a mission. But then I was greeted with an even harder boss, so I just threw in the towel and turned enemy health to as low as it could go and enemy damage as low as it could too. I did not want to spend another 10 hours grinding for gold just to kill this guy. And off course there appears to be lots of new game+ content, but I think I will put this down for awhile. If you could increase the gold gain in the accessibility settings to actually fun amounts, then I would be having a lot more fun with this game.
If parts of this review make no sense, it is because I was filled and blinded by rage whilst writing this. I had much more to rant about but I have reached the word limit.
So in conclusion, if you like rogue legacy, you'll like this one for awhile before getting sick of it by the end of it.