Rogue Legacy’s Legacy

Rogue Legacy is free for PlayStation Plus subscribers in February 2015. After spending what amounted to eternity with it (read: 3 hours), my sentiment is that the game’s legacy is that I will safely forget that I ever played it. It’s a game which left little to no impression on me. Sadly, it was also a game I wanted desperately to like; even going as far as to use Rogue Legacy as justification for my continued subscription to the PlayStation Plusservice several weeks back.

Let me start by listing off what Rogue Legacy does right. Foremost, the game’s interpretation of roguelike design (traditionally: your character is prone to dying every other second; when s/he dies, your levels and loot are lost forever) is clever and novel. When your character dies in Rogue Legacy (which you still do every other second), s/he leaves behind the money that s/he accumulated before doing so. This makes for a neat feature, because the next character you choose to play as can use that money toward permanently upgrading classes, equipment, etc. So while the game is a roguelike (hence, Rogue Legacy, I suspect), the sense of progression that it presents slightly subverts genre tropes. Neat touch, I admit.

Besides this meaningful contribution to the subgenre however, there is very little that I enjoyed about Rogue Legacy. Perhaps most egregious of all its faults however, is that the game’s random design is too random. What results is a game that often feels unfair, detracting from the efforts put into differentiating it from other more thoughtfully designed and conservative roguelikes, such as Spelunky. I often found myself in rooms teeming with enemies and overflowing with ill-placed environmental hazards, dying quickly as a result of this glut.

I suppose that I could have put up with the bad random game design if the actual combat or RPG portions of Rogue Legacy were good. And they are to an extent: developer Cellar Door Games managed to craft a middling roguelike that looks like Castlevania has been interpreted through the lens of a child. What this means is that you fight against suits of armour and paintings, and die when falling on spikes. The controls are decent and the core combat involves reading enemy tells, moving out of range from these telegraphed attacks, and then counterattacking. Nothing is approached with the inventiveness that’s found in the aforementioned “death as funding future generations of offspring” design approach though. It’s all tired, and not worth my time.

In the end, Rogue Legacy’s legacy is that it presents its players with a unique progression system, but then goes ahead and drops the ball with its overly random game design, and tired, middling aesthetic and gameplay. I suppose there are worse fates: certainly, you could be Superman 64.