Mechanically, Rogue Legacy 2 is almost perfect. Movement and combat feel pretty damn good, takes some skill to master, and upgrades in fun ways through the game.

Beyond that... Rogue Legacy 2 feels TOO balanced. The classes all feel relatively similar, with only minor playstyle variations between them. Runs feel TOO consistent. You're going to play every run the exact same way: find some artifacts that give you minor stat upgrades until you hit your Resolve limit, then go try to fight the boss, spend all your gold on a +1 boost to your damage, rinse and repeat.

Fifty times.

I hope you like grinding.

RL2 is missing the randomness that makes Roguelikes fun. Bosses feel more like stat checks than skill checks. "Did you grind enough stat upgrades to beat this boss? Good job, do it again for another 10 hours to beat the next boss."

There are no OP artifact combos. There are no cheesy builds. RL2 is missing variety.

Game is fun for ~10 hours, but then the grind sets in and it very quickly stops being fun.

Shoutout to the artists and animators though, RL2 looks great, has a unique art direction, and clearly has a lot of love put into the art.

A conditional "thumbs down" from me; however, this is a high quality, responsive game.

Rogue Legacy 2.0 would be a more fair name than Rogue Legacy 2. It's not so much a sequel as it is a perfect version of the original Rogue Legacy. Your enjoyment will depend on how much you played the original. If you put 100 hours in and had your fill, this game won't pull you back in for another 100 unless you're the type that loves repetition and are clamoring for a second playthrough. If you played the original a modest amount and bounced off for some reason, the same outcome is likely to occur here. If you never played the original for some reason or another, but were interested, then Rogue Legacy 2 is the way to go (preferably once it's out of Early Access and content is complete).

I unfortunately fall into the camp that ultimately bounced off the original after a modest amount of time, and that was mostly because my skill ceiling demands grinding out buffs and unlocks in order to consistently advance, and the same has been true in Rogue Legacy 2.

Despite my very subjective personal opinion, it is fun to play, the graphics and animation are a huge improvement, controls are responsive, progression and variety is compelling, and the value proposition is high (well priced). However, I still would only recommend this game to a specific type of player under certain circumstances, so I'm effectively "rounding down" my assessment to highly conditional "thumbs down".

It's Titles like these that make me wish there would be a 'Neutral' review option. For the sake of my current feelings towards the game, I guess I'd have to go with more of a 'No', however. I will take the liberty of comparing it to Rogue Legacy 1, considering this is a sequel (or maybe a prequel?) to it made by the same studio. This review was made as of the Far Shores Update, which is Update 0.2.0.


While Rogue Legacy 1 was more focused on the Rogue-Lite aspect with Metroidvania-Elements, Rogue Legacy 2 does it the other way around. Whereas movement abilities like Dash and Double Jump were helpful but not necessary to progress in RL1, they are an absolute requirement in RL2. Combat at its core is about the same as it was in RL1, but it's more gimmicky now, as the different classes actually fight and behave differently with their main attack. Class talents work on a Cooldown System rather than a Mana system (the exception being the Mage, but his Talent is having two spells, so it doesn't really count). Characters feel really squishy (which is mainly due to enemies and hazards dealing respectable amount of damage, even in the first biome), and due to the fact that maneuvering through rooms is now more of a challenge than it was in RL1, I find myself dying to environmental hazards more often than to enemies. On that note, hitboxes for environmental hazards feel somehow...too big. Spike hitboxes in RL1 were annoying sometimes, and almost everything in RL2 has had this feel so far. Overall, RL2 requires more Skill than RL1 did, so if you found RL1 to be 'hard', you might want to stay away from this one.


Since the game is still in Early Access, I'm not gonna comment on the Story as a whole. Storytelling is a different matter. In RL1, the Story was told through Diary Entries. Diary Entries make a return in RL2, as well as lingering memories which you can access after you've found the corresponding ability (again, more of a Metroidvania than RL1 was). The lore bits in RL2 feel a bit more...dynamic, though, which can both be a good and a bad thing, depending on how it's written. What does strike me as a bit of a letdown is the humour. RL1's humour might not be for everyone, but I found it enjoyable. The humour in RL2, by comparison, feels forced and immature to me. Lines said by NPCS and Skill/Spell descriptions try too hard to be funny, and in doing so, fail to be. As a suggestion to the devs, maybe tone down a bit on the butt 'jokes'? A well placed butt joke or pun may result in a chuckle, but three or four in a short span of time is just...ugh. Especially when there's absolutely nothing clever about them.


Graphics are always a subjective matter. RL1's graphics were pretty 'pixely', but it worked pretty well. Sprites, Backgrounds and Environment mixed very well, resulting in a pleasant to look at screen overall. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying RL2 looks bad by comparison, but...it lacks that same charm. Character and Enemy sprites can seem a bit out of place at times compared to environment and Background. The graphics can feel a bit...disjointed, is the best term, I guess? RL2's graphics tried something different from RL1, and I'm not sure I like it. I don't hate it, but...I also don't exactly like it. I'm afraid I can't really explain it. What I'm trying to say: RL1 looked 'older', but I liked that artstyle better, for some reason.

I'm really trying to like this game, but I just...can't. It's similar enough to RL1 to make me want to play it, but at the same time it tries too many different new things at once to get/keep me interested. Maybe with future patches, my view on the game will change to a more definite opinion.

Put into Early Access far too soon, not really enough in the game to give proper feedback about. Not worth paying money for, wait for a full release for that.

I loved my initial impressions of this game but as time went on it just wore me down so fast. The sheer amount of grinding required for the castle is just daunting and you often feel without castle progress you are at a severe disadvantage (which is mostly true). But the biggest problems come in later areas where the game decides to become a nightmare of platforming and bullet hell of tracking bullets; the fifth boss in particular is bad about this.

But my biggest issue is the Resolve system actively discouraging you from the typical Roguelike power fantasy of getting obscenely overpowered. But if you take too many relics you start to suffer max health decreases while half the relics already have downsides to begin with. You will never feel that strong like you can in Dead Cells, Binding of Isaac, Hades or any other modern roguelike.

The first Rogue Legacy did a great job at introducing a lot of people to the rogue-lite/like formula. The ability to acquire permanent character upgrades made the challenge of diving into a new dungeon every run more approachable. However, in light of how much the genre has developed since, that game just does not hold up very well. The main issue being the one still present here: the grind.

I feel like the fun of playing a rogue-lite/like primarily comes from learning and then mastering the game systems, so when you're offered less than ideal items/abilities in any given run, you can still eek out a win through skill. And of course you're always hoping for a god run where you can just plow through encounters (e.g., Risk of Rain 1/2, Gungeon, Slay the Spire, Isaac, etc.). I don't feel like I can do that here.

In the beginning, unlocking the classes and learning their different styles of game play feels great. The initial static upgrades you get (armor and runes) also feel like they have a significant impact on runs. You also acquire permanent movement upgrades throughout the castle at a fairly quick pace, and that makes exploration and combat a lot more enjoyable as well (however, once you have acquired those couple items you've completed the metroidvania portion of the game and the whole castle is essentially open to you).

Unfortunately, very quickly that progression comes to a grinding halt. The primary way you grow your character is by purchasing upgrades with gold. However, the gold you acquire from a 15 minute run might only buy you (for example) one point of an armor weight upgrade, which very likely will have no appreciable affect on your character. So you end up doing a lot of re-rolling, hoping to find a character you enjoy playing that is coupled with a gold-earning trait that is manageable. But then you're just min-maxing your gold farming time, and at that point you might as well just play an MMO or dungeon looter where the grind is MEANT to be the game play focus.

What's also frustrating is that you can't ever really take advantage of the relics you're offered in any given run due to the "encumbrance/resolve" system, which lowers your maximum health for taking too many of them. And wearing better armor increases your encumbrance, which lowers your resolve and thus the number of relics you can take. Aside from these systems being pretty obtuse at first, this means you can either wear your best armor and have little resolve and not get to play with the relics you see, or you can wear lower-tiered armor and get a couple more relics, but then you're underpowered regardless because you're wearing bad armor. So even if you wanted to ignore gold-farming and rely on relics, everything will literally one shot you because your maximum health will be slashed. Not to mention the fact that the relics seem all over the place power-level wise despite all having the significant drawback of lowering your maximum health.

Finally, the platforming and combat unfortunately end up feeling really repetitive. While the movement feels really smooth at first, fixed dash distances and fixed heights on some jump mechanics (spin kicks and the void dash spring thing) just make the platforming feel not very precise, especially because you end up getting punished by inadvertently jumping into enemies or hazards. And as to the combat, because of the focus on gold farming, I found myself gravitating towards high dps attack-based characters and hardly using any magic or talents. Maybe I just need to git gud, but I just couldn't see the reason to use a spell that might have a one second cast animation that leads to me getting hit over a standard attack.

tl;dr: The game tries to be a combo of a rogue like, dungeon crawler, and metroidvania but doesn't do any one of those things well. Way too grindy for permanent upgrades that don't feel like they have an impact. Just play an MMO/dungeon crawler where the focus is on grinding better and better loot instead. Encumbrance system is simply not fun; you don't get to play with the relics the game offers you in any given run and the relics don't feel like they have a big impact on gameplay. Play RoR, Isaac, Gungeon, StS, etc. instead. Metroidvania portion is over pretty quickly and not very deep. Just play Hollow Knight, Ori, Metroid, etc. instead.

If I could thumbs-sideways this game I would. This game sits somewhere between "fine" and "good" for me. I think it looks and plays all right but it doesn't really stand apart from anything else. The original Rogue Legacy was a fantastic game in 2013, but this feels like a sequel from 2014. We've had 9 years of amazing Roguelikes and combat platformers over the last nine years, but it feels like Rogue Legacy 2 was too busy copying the first game to find much inspiration outside of Hollow Knight. It's only really a thumbs-down from me because I think there are better roguelites and combat platformers out there already. I'll get a little more nuanced below.

The combat feels pretty similar to the first game while also feeling vaguely Hollow Knight inspired. Having played a great deal of Hollow Knight I frequently found myself attempting to play *this* game *that* way, which usually didn't end well for me. Hollow Knight features the ability to attack downwards to 'pogo' off of enemies and environmental hazards during platforming, whereas Rogue Legacy 2 gives you a 'spinkick' which you perform with down and jump which allows you to jump off of enemies and *some* specific environmental hazards. Hollow Knight features a 'shade cloak' upgrade which allows you to dash through enemies and projectiles to reposition during combat, whereas Rogue Legacy 2 features a very similar dash upgrade which allows you to dash through *some* enemies and *some* projectiles during combat. Hollow Knight allows you to attack above and below you whereas Rogue Legacy allows you attack up and down with *some* of the weapons but not most of them. I don't need Rogue Legacy to do exactly what Hollow Knight did with its combat, but I found the combat much tighter and more consistent in Hollow Knight. The approach in Rogue Legacy feels inconsistent. You can pogo off of *some* projectiles but not others, and you can dash through *some* things on the screen but not others, and this turns into kind of a mess once the game starts trying to mix platforming with bullet hell after the first couple of bosses.

Speaking of bosses, these bosses can feel like stat checks moreso than cool encounters. They have huge amounts of health and deal heavy amounts of damage in sequences that often feel like bullet hell. Most of the time you can get the pattern down and simply 'get good' to take down the boss with out needing to brute force your way through upgrades but the massive health pools make them feel like chores or endurance trials. I could hit them 100 times without upgrades or die 30 runs trying and eventually double my damage to make it easier. Upgrades do less to make me feel more powerful than they make me feel like I'm wasting less time getting around and fighting the bosses.

Speaking of the *upgrades*, this is the bit where Rogue Legacy 2 feels more like a Free To Play game than a roguelite to me. Every time you die you bring back your gold, and you can invest into permanent upgrades for your characters. You can buy and upgrade weapons and armor as well as skills on the 'skill tree.' Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of these upgrades are completely inconsequential in small doses. Sure, you can eventually double your damage output, but that isn't just a few upgrades to do. That's a new sword and about twenty damage upgrades on the skill tree worth of investment. Similarly, there are about 30 life upgrades, 40 armor upgrades, and a truckload of other upgrades for other systems in the game that feel like otherwise arbitrary limitations like weight restrictions or limitations on the aforementioned upgrades themselves. Is it fun to spend twenty minutes on a run and then die so you can spend all that money you gathered on an upgrade like, "2% more int scaling with food?" How about two more points of damage reduction on top of the 80 you already have? If those sorts of upgrades sound exciting to you you'll be right at home grinding away in this game.

I've been harsh here but I don't think the game is "bad," per se. I think it's just kind of rote I've done all this stuff before in games that handled each of those aspects a little bit better than this one. The endless grind for trivial stat increases makes dying feel tedious and boring instead of exciting. The 'variety' offered by the various classes the game offers feel less 'quirky and fun' and more like lists of restrictions and limitations to how I can play. This guy can't attack up or down? This one needs to spin kick off of his attacks to hurt anyone? Not the most inspiring group of characters. I did appreciate the lancer and chef classes, for how much more interactive they felt with the game than the others.

You might love it or you might think it's boring. You probably won't regret spending the money on it but you *might* end up disappointed with the final product.

Maybe I'm just getting old but the game felt too grindy and difficult. I remember loving the first game but this one didn't connect with me. I don't have a problem with games being difficult, but I do have a problem with unrewarding and punishing grinds.

Relics are underwhelming and have very little synergy. There are no breaking runs or builds.
Half of runs are dedicated to farming resources. Spending twenty minutes of time to incrementally increase stats so that the next twenty minutes might allow you to progress isn't fun.
The "legacy" part of the game is a gimmick at best, as I've yet to find an actual impact in heirs from one choice to another as far as lineage is concerned.
The actual game part of this is solid. Movement feels fun, combat is addictive with a high skill ceiling, and boss fights are extremely enjoyable, but progression is essentially halted when you move from one biome to the next when you get stat-checked by tougher enemies until you grind out more resources to get back up to par, so the enjoyable parts of the game get interrupted by the grind.
Overall there's a good game in there, but it's all buried under mechanics and progression that don't respect your time. I feel like they forgot why people enjoy roguelike games in the first place.

Tl;Dr: The new graphics are swanky and the way weight and armor was balanced is pleasingly elegant, but the movement is frustrating and the game is less approachable. Wait until it has more content before giving it a try.

Most of this review is approached from a "How is this different from Rogue Legacy?" because the game is more of a re-do than anything else. If you loved Rogue Legacy, that might be what you want!

The Good:
Playing with a lesser percentage of armor-weight capacity provides benefits to mana generation in a fun trade-off choices type of way. The graphics look pretty awesome (although tastes vary), and there are some interesting world additions that spice up what moving through the zones are like. The disability system is cool, rewarding difficult choices (although the rewards per disability-type need tweaking), and the class system provides a lot of different ways to experience the game for play-style. Blueprints are also received in order, which solves one particular itch from the last game.

The Bad:
Rogue Legacy 2 keeps some of its predecessor's bad habits. Runes are suitably frustrating, especially because you're often completely unable to get them, skilled or not. In a game that is set-up to create constant progress, this seems ... pointless? The game is made broader because of the huge difference in play-styles classes offer, which also makes the game harder. You can pick a class and try to become skilled with it, but you still retain the three offspring choices per death, which means you're just as likely to not get a class you like when there are 5 or so, especially when half of them have debilitating traits you may not prefer. This was a minor issue in the first game, but when your weapon types are completely different some classes are just unpleasant to play. Of note is the Valkyrie, whose spear is weirdly awkward. If it's an aimed weapon, why does it only go four directions instead of any, like the Archer? Both the Duelist and the Valkyrie suffer from that awkward dead-zone just a little bit above you where you have to jump (but not too much!) to land completely horizontal attacks.

The Ugly:
The platforming. Rogue legacy demanded you get decent at low-level platforming and then slowly handed you mobility tools so eventually you could move however you liked. RL2 instead forces you to interact with the environment, using these lanterns you can kick off of. Maybe it'll grow on me, it doesn't feel like it.

I haven't even gotten into any of the typical Early Access complaints, such as limited content and repeated rooms. I certainly haven't given up on the game, but in hindsight I would have waited for more development before handing over my money.