Rogue Legacy Xbox One Review
Rogue Legacy Xbox One
Publisher: Cellar Door Games
Developer: Cellar Door Games
Genre:
PEGI: E10+
Comments:
Welcome to Rogue Legacy, a game far from your normal platformer and quite unlike any other game you have played before. Your whole purpose in this game is to battle, collect Gold, die, upgrade yourself and your families manor, avenge your ancestor’s death, and repeat until you are strong enough to defeat all five bosses. Rogue Legacy is a 2D action-platformer, that brings us different variations every time through 30-60 second gameplay before you die and must go back into the castle.
Your ultimate goal in Rogue Legacy is to explore the randomly generated castle, defeat four bosses in each of their areas in the dungeons, and then defeat the final boss. This is the goal in the game but after first playing Rogue Legacy and never being able to survive more than 30 seconds I was getting very frustrated. Rogue Legacy has been out on other platforms for quite some time so I was in luck to search online as to why I was so bad at this game. The entire game is built on repeatedly entering the castle and avenging your ancestor’s death. Each time you die, the next family member in line can take the place and head into battle.
There are many variations of family in the game and each descendant brings their own characteristics and abilities to the game to assist you. Some of the characteristics can be genetic inabilities such as ADHD, which will give that character additional speed. We also have dwarfism and color-blindness to give your character the abilities of fitting into small spaces or with the color-blindness showing the screen in black and white. Other abilities we see are related to the upgrades you can apply to your Family Manor. Each time you die in the game you have a chance to spend the Gold collected in the previous run on items such as health and armor increase, mana, increased protection in your weaponry and more. Any unused Gold unfortunately cannot be saved as it must be paid in order to enter the Castle again for the next battle. Once you pay unused Gold to enter the castle your new motivation (at least my motivation) is to survive longer, kill more enemies and make sure the next time you exit the castle you are able to spend more on your upgrades.
Along with each variation of family members we also have an army of evil opponents, whether you are battling against zombies, flying ghouls, ghosts, skeletons, levitating eyes, wolves, ninjas, knights, portrait frames (yes you read that right) and many more, you are in trouble right from the start. Imagine going through the castle and in each room your encounter is a combination of about half of the listed enemies and a treasure chest at the end of the room. Its chaos! There are moments in the game when you are in an empty room with nothing to loot but this to me is considered your few seconds of breathing. Enjoy this time and move onto more crazy adventures in the next room over.
Rogue Legacy does a fantastic job at bringing to life the 2D side scrolling platformer with the charming pixel art we see in the characters, the villains and backgrounds of the Castle or dungeons you are traveling through. Even though you battle many ghosts, goblins or ghouls, the colors are vibrant and pop when they need to be but dark and ominous when needed. Its also a fantastic concept to have the game in black and white anytime you are a family member that has color-blindness, giving the gamer such a contrast in game play from the great animation of colors to complete monotone in color. As you flail around the villains and your environments, you’re listening to the sounds of sword swinging, quick swift jumps, evil doers roaming and attacking making it feel like this is a crazy fight to stay alive.
Cellar Door Games presents the game to us as be killed and your offspring will avenge your death but to me after the first few attempts, it was so much more. With all the upgrading to happen in order for you to succeed, your skill level increases every time you last longer in the Castle collecting Gold. You will go from 30 second intervals at first to 60 second plays for at least 15 to 20 hours as the game keeps you sucked in and wanting to complete your Family Manor to the full capacity.
Rogue Legacy is available May 27, 2015 on Xbox One for $14.99 and available now on all other platforms.