Rogue Legacy is 2D plataformer in the style of Castlevania and Metroid Prime. Your goal is to cure the king from an illness and, hopefully, heir the throne. What makes this game unique is that you don't play as one character, but as a family, generation after generation and every child have their own traits and skills. Once a new child take arms and goes into the castle, the castle is randomly generated (also know as procedurally generated). Yes, sounds weird, but do not worry, we will explain how this work in more details.
Once the game starts you are "just" a knight and there you go into the castle that holds the cure for your king. Killing creatures and destroying objects gives you gold that can be used to buy equipment (sword, chest armor, boots, cape, helm and gloves), buy runes (every equipment have 1 rune slot) and to build your Manor. The more you spend in construction, the bigger your family manor, and more powerful your linage is: stronger skills, more HP, mana, damage, lesser cool downs, etc. This is the main loop of the game, kill creatures, get gold, get more powerful, repeat.
The moment you die, your character goes into history and you have to choose between 3 of your current children to keep your legacy. Each character is unique, having very creative and interesting traits, as being colorblind, dwarf, giant, old, fast, afraid of chickens (our favorite), etc. Other than your standard sword, each character will have a class, wizard, paladin, miner, among many others that you will open as you invest enough in your manor, each one have a skill that might be just what you are looking for.
Every creature has a defined pattern that you can learn and explore to improve your fighting techniques, and as you go deep into the castle, the more numerous, diverse and strong this creatures will get, and the more difficult and crazy their pattern will be. If you come to defeat the final boss you will be given a New Game +, where you will receive bonus to gold drops and harder creatures. This can go on as much as you like, but be warned, once you defeat the final boss there is NO way back! (Yes, New Game +50 exists, you can find it on youtube!)
In that regard we considered the combat system to have a risk vs reward balance a little bit off. Even when you reach the maximum manor construction, have the best equipment and the most overpowered class, the creatures will scale much, much further than you. If you risk killing the majority of them you will be receiving tremendous, if not fatal, amounts of damage, and the castle is very scarce in recovery items. After a certain point, killing the regular creatures provide a tinny reward compared to how hard can be to tackle the challenge. The game DOES have an infinite power buff that you can farm, but such buff does NOT scale with the New Game + version, meaning that a +5 HP in New Game +1 might worth a lot if a creature gives you 30 dmg, but not when they do 500!
This leads to the "end game" effect you can find in the higher levels of New Game + difficulties: only a couple of builds are viable and the player just rush for bosses, leaving behind all the creative alternatives, as they become tremendously underpowered. We believe that this could be solved by either scaling the equipment and permanent bonuses with the New Game + version, which would allow players that are not up to such challenge to have a little bit of room to make mistakes or allowing the player to re-visit any level of New Game +, where he would be allowed to feel powerful and work their way to increased status without having to constantly die.
Overall Rogue Legacy is a very entertaining game that can provide you with many hours of fun, with nice art and music (we really liked the music!). The game also provides some "easter eggs" we found to be very entertaining and enlightening, as they tell a little bit of the history about the developers and the studio. Last but not least, we also praise the creative approach to which the developers took, in order to keep the continuity of the story telling, adapting player failure to an adventure of great proportions.
Final Score: 9 out of 10.