This is a soft no; it's not a bad game, just... hollow. Maybe better in a multiplayer, or after some patches.

Mechanically, it's Link to the Past, complete with most of the subweapons. Hookshot, boomerang, bow, hammer, etc. It plays basically the same, if a bit less polished, with two core differences: The first being that the dungeons (not the overworld) are randomized from a collection of premade rooms, and the second being some lite RPG elements in the form of classes and upgrade paths. Those differences are also where it kind of falls short.

Exploring the overworld is pretty neat. It's a fairly big world with a lot of secrets and unlockable shortcuts. The problem is that exploration doesn't really mean anything. Unlike LttP, there are no heart pieces and precious few items to find. You can wander down a long and circuitous side path, through hidden caves, hookshotting across ravines, and at the end of it you open up a shortcut that you'll never use because there's no reason to go back there. With few exceptions the only items you find in the world are orbs that make you lose 0.1% less gems when you enter a dungeon. You can sequence break in certain places to reach late game areas early, but there's no reason to, because there's nothing to find there and any enemies will take 800 hits to kill.

That leads to issue #2, the RPG elements. You level up by spending gems, which are only found in the randomized dungeons. The abilities you upgrade aren't particularly interesting, just tiny incremental improvements to damage, attack speed, area of effect, etc. You're never excited to spend gems, you just play a dungeon until you die and then your numbers go up. Next time it's a little easier, but the experience is the same. All it really amounts to is when you go down a dungeon floor suddenly enemies will take ten times as many hits to kill. Not different enemies, mind you, the same enemies just with higher stats. Then you push as far as you can, die, and now those enemies are easier because your numbers went up. The game would play exactly the same if it didn't have rpg elements and enemies didn't arbitrarily get more HP, it would just be half as long.

Secondary to the RPG elements, there's townbuilding. You pay gems to construct buildings, which unlocks new shops or upgrade trees. And that's basically the end of townbuilding. Some new NPCs show up, they have a textbox. They don't have personalities and they don't do anything.

And lastly, there's the randomness. Dungeons are randomly generated in roguelike fashion. You can find temporary versions of the various weapons as well as temporary stat boosts, both of which last until you leave the dungeon (usually by dying). It starts out pretty neat, then after a few hours just kinda becomes tedious. In LttP, the various puzzle rooms gate progression. You have to figure out a room to get an item or advance to the next room, and then you are done with that room. In Tasos, puzzles give you sometimes keys, rarely stat boots, usually just gems. They benefit you to solve them, but they aren't usually necessary, and that becomes a problem when the pool of rooms it's pulling from is way too small. You see the same puzzles over and over, and you don't want to spend the time going through the motions to solve them again because it's tedious and you probably won't get anything useful. At the same time, the randomness means you might not see certain rooms that you _need to find_. To craft a shovel, you need to collect 8 rare drops from an enemy that only shows up in a _single room_ in the first dungeon, and that room isn't guaranteed to appear. If those enemies also show up in later dungeons I haven't found them, and in ten hours i only have half the items needed to craft an item that, near as i can tell, you're expected to have at the beginning of the game.

All in all, it's still pretty good as an LttP-style adventure game, but frustrating in that all the roguelike selling points honestly just make the game worse, rather than providing any interesting new dimension. Not unsalvageable, but it needs some hammering.

tl;dr: I spoke really highly about the game after playing the demo. Gifting multiple copies to friends upon release. With all the errors and rough online coop, I'm glad that I gifted the game as I'd feel guilty if I convinced other people to purchase a buggy game.

Online Coop is currently brutal. I only played local coop on the demo, but didn't expect all the issues online.

If any player views their inventory, every player gets a black screen that says "Another player has paused the game." This is brutal as an accidental spacebar hit goes black screen for everyone. The only menus that do not lock other players are shop-menus.

When any player talks or interacts with an object, the text pops up - which is fine. However, it also shows you the controls for what they're using, that being controller/keyboard. So if you're playing on the opposite, then you're going to get confused.

Sometimes, textboxes seem to get "stuck" on screen. If you get this error, die and get res'ed.

Another brutal error is that multiple players can use keys on keydoors within a decent window - resulting in not enough keys for the dungeon... had to reset.

I'm on the fence about "Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos." We bought it to play online co-op. For that, it's... OK. It's fun to play. But, it just feels like co-op was added as an afterthought. If you're more interested in the social experience of playing a casual co-op game, it'll be fine. But, if you want to really focus on the game with some friends, you might want to think about it. Single-player presents even more of a poser: you lose some of the fun, social aspect. But, you also lose some of the co-op specific game problems. After 37.8 hours of gameplay (having finished the main/side questlines and working on the last four "grinding" Achievements), I'll lean slightly negative and Not Recommend it. But, it's close.

• One of the biggest issues is that often the game will de-sync what each player sees: some players will see one thing, while the others will see something else.
  
• There's also a problem with internet stability and player presence in the game. A player can only enter the game at the start from the lobby. If their internet goes down, they'll find that they've been kicked from the game and can't re-enter. The host has to save and quit and then re-invite everyone.

• The most obvious issue with co-op gameplay is the top-down view. If the game were first person, everyone could wander freely. But, top-down restricts the scope. As the players move farther and farther apart, the screen zooms out as the game tries to fit everyone in. At some point, the game can't do that anymore, you won't be able to see everyone, you won't be able to move apart any more, and you'll have to blindly move towards each other until everyone's visible.
  
• If you change rooms or areas, the whole team gets dragged over to it. In one case, one of our members fell into the ocean where there was no way to return to land. It was also at an area transition zone. So, the rest of us got dragged in and we all swam around until we died.
  
• In dungeons, if someone dies, the other team members can carry their bones to a resurrection statue to be resuscitated. If you're wandering the wilderness and someone dies, there's a problem. If you're near a transporter, you can transport someplace and the person will be revived. But, if you're not, there's no place to take their bones to be resurrected. The team has to choose whether they should trek back to town or leave that person as a ghost as they continue playing. They really need a Cleric type of class (or just a healing/resurrect) spell in the game.
  
• Menus are literal game stoppers. If anyone enters any kind of menu (even inventory), gameplay pauses and the other players are presented with a black screen saying someone's entered a menu. This really puts a damper on things as no one wants to look at a map, their inventory, their equipment, the Bestiary, or anything else because everyone else gets stopped while they do so.
  
• If someone talks to an NPC, everything else gets interrupted to watch the dialog go by. So, anyone trying to buy anything from a shopkeeper gets kicked out of that function if someone accidentally talks to the shopkeeper.
  
• The loot system varies in how it handles co-op. Health, gold and gems seem to get distributed across everyone equally. But, magic and other items seem to go to whoever picks them up. Usually, it works well. But, sometimes you wonder who's going to get what. For instance, we're still unsure if things like an "x% increase in tool use" pickup applies to the person who opened the chest or to everyone in the party.

• Finishing all four dungeons doesn't finish the main quest. You still have to enter the Eternal Dungeon, enter the transporter in the lobby, and defeat the four bosses. THAT finishes the quest. That "arena" needs to be put in its own location with a quest marker pointing to it.
  
• There are two currencies in the game. At the "wilderness" level, you find gold. But, you buy everything with gems. In the dungeons, you find gems. But, you "buy" everything with gold. There's no point in this. One currency should be able to do the job. Multiple currencies shouldn't be used as gatekeepers to tasks/abilities.
  
• There are unfinished/inaccessible areas in the game. In the northeast corner, you can get to Hilltop Mines, but there's no way to enter them. A bit to the west, there's an area of clouds that you can fully explore, but the cloud cover doesn't clear. On the east side of the map, just below the center line, there's an area of clouds with two question marks in it, with no way to access it. And, over in the southwest corner, there's a crab/skull rock that you finish a quest to get access to which contains nothing but an "Under Construction" sign.
  
• In the northeast corner of the map, there are invisible walls.
  
• At some point, you get a wand that's supposed to let you see the world as it really is. It puts purple sparkles around the view. But, as far as I can tell, it's only useful for one thing near where you get it.
  
• In the 4th dungeon, the trap triggers on the floor are so similar in color to the rest of the floor that you can't tell they're there. In one room, we had to trigger those to give us access to some areas and we couldn't find them. We finally found them by accident.
  
• In the dungeons, you can get a dungeon map. But, outside of the layout of the dungeon, it shows nothing useful. It should at least show the resurrection statues. Of course, even without finding/buying the map, once you find a resurrection statue, it should show on your mini-map until it gets used up.
  
• There are several digging areas that just don't work. Trying to dig where "x marks the spot" just plays a "boink" sound. Sometimes you can work around this by digging around the "x." But, not always. This is an Achievement buster (see the following).
  
• The 100 power spheres that you're supposed to find for an Achievement are nothing but a make-work pain. They let you keep more of your gems when you enter a dungeon. But, 1) why does a dungeon take the gems in the first place?, 2) at most you'll only ever be able to keep 25% of those gems, and 3) keeping more gems would only be useful in the very early part of the game (where you won't have any power spheres to speak of). They could be used as a reward for exploring the map. But, my map is fully explored and I've been spending hours trying to hunt down power spheres that are either impossible to find or can't be dug up in the first place.
  
• Why is there a "powerful glove" AND a hammer? Except for a few specific items, they're mostly interchangeable.
  
• The map doesn't default to zooming in on the character. Instead, it zooms in on the town.
  
• The giant frog is cute, but it's basically just a pain to use. You have to switch to the "call," use it, wait for the frog to appear and, hopefully, pick you up.
  
• To explore the Overgrowth (lava) area, you need a compass. But, I never noticed any difference between having the compass and not having it. Regardless, once you have it, it ought to do something useful. It could point to the nearest collectible.
  
• Swimming (which is upgradeable) seems to be useless. AFAIK, it's used solely for getting to three chests.
  
• Several characters have the ability to "fly." Yet, they can't use that ability to cross broken bridges or move over tiny obstacles.
  
• There's an Achievement associated with catching three Legendary fish. Two of them are in areas marked by jumping fish (which are supposed to mark areas where more rare fish are). But, the 3rd one is in an unmarked area.
  
• To use a potion, you have to go into your inventory and select which potion will be displayed. You have one potion slot that shows. When you use that potion, the slot doesn't show the next available potion.

I really wanted to like this game. This is a cute multiplayer copy of the older Zelda games, and honestly exactly what I would want if it weren't for the game breaking bugs, specifically, one MAJOR bug. Unfortunately, this bug make it a chore to play and after over a year I've lost hope they will ever fix it.

I will preface by saying I have only played this game in multiplayer, so I don't know if this bug exist in singleplayer. However, I bought this game purely for its multiplayer function, since well, I could just play The Legend of Zelda if I wanted a singleplayer game like this.

Now onto the actual bug:
At multiple locations where you exit a room back into the overworld (ex. exiting a cave), you get teleported to the corner of the map. This softlocks you since you end up either walking on the water out of bounds or in the snow biome, where you don't have the necessary gear to get out of said biome because you weren't supposed to be there yet. This does not happen at every room exit but it is completely repeatable at the exits where it does happen. I'm astonished this has not been fixed since it is completely game breaking and you will encounter this bug even if you are just going through the main story line - i.e. no exploring hidden paths, no checking the cracks etc.

I waited over a year to buy it hoping they would fix this bug. Alas, I am greatly disappointed.

I want to like this game but for now it's just another game that isn't finished. At least put the flag "Early access" please

Don't believe the fake reviews. This is one of the most broken and buggy games on the entire steam platform.
This abomination is why developers should spend at least an hour or two QA testing their games before releasing them.

Going to list just a handful of them that I encountered in the past two sessions playing it:

*Since everyones camera angle is tied together, if one person lags a bit when going through a transition point all players will get stuck repeatedly going back and forth between the two points. The same applies for houses and shops.

*Enemies positions are client side and will occasionally desync between players, thus people will be fighting entirely different enemies or nothing will show up at all for others.

*Some transition points are completely broken, for example there is a cave near the waterfalls that you need to go through to get the power gloves, yet it sends one player through normally (and makes their screen black till they alt+f4 out) and the rest of the party all the way across the map to the snow biome where they get murdered from the Tier 4 enemies.

*Spells and projectiles do not cast towards the mouse, but rather where the player is facing, and even then not where the player is facing all the time. For example, casting a firebolt to the left trying to hit a zombie yet it decides mid flight to go straight up. Same issues when using the controller.

*Players all share one camera, so if someone goes afk it stretches the camera out all the way to where the rest of the team cannot see one foot infront of them, in a game where things generally kill you in three hits, this is not ideal. Ghosts also pull the camera where they move, so if a player is just dead and bored it makes the game hell for the rest of the team.

*All players are forced to be in the same room, even though we have encountered bugs where we were able to explore separate rooms on our own. The bug proves that it's unnecessary and also is frustrating, this is similar to issue #1 except in dungeons, occasionally you will break off from the rest of the party and just be going your own way. This seems to happen if someone alt tabs out or is in a menu when transitioning.

*Bosses are unbalanced and stupidly inconsistent with the dungeon theme . For example, in the graveyard is an 8000 HP boss and all he does is just a weak easily avoidable fireball attack, then lets the players hit him, and repeats till he dies. His HP implies he's suppose to be tough, but he is simply just a time waster. Dungeon 2 hints throughout the entire thing that the boss is going to be a two headed snake or something but instead is just a dancing mushroom that takes 2-4 damage per hit for seemingly no reason, and is just a damage sponge for the sake of being a damage sponge. Dungeon 1's beetle was fine, but the entire dungeon hinted at it being a tentacle monster of a sort.

*Players will DC out mid dungeon fairly often just because of how broken the game is, and they cannot rejoin until the host goes all the way back to lobby, and their gems are not saved on disconnection. So the rest of the party will have the full dungeon loot yet the person who DCed will come back with 0.

*Trap damage is very inconsistent. In one floor arrows will hit for 50, another will hit for 200.

*Early-mid game every class other than just straight up melee is totally useless. For example in our play I was hitting for 200x3 dmg three hit combos with the thief while the mage was hitting for like 25-50 and the ranger was around 150, running out of arrows after ten shots.

*I really cannot express just how much absolute cancer the shared camera is, it's really bad, especially since it only gives about half a squares worth of vision to players who are near the borders, and enemies will occasionally run off screen and attack from out of viewable distance even though they're only like 10-20 feet away.

I am glad I got this game for free, because I would have absolutely hated this if I had to pay full price. And I honestly feel sorry for those who did have to pay for this garbage. Literally a $5 game in my opinion, a few dollars more than what they spent on Q&A testing.


Also just a fun thing, so in this situation I had four enemies to my right, as well as a bat over there too. To the south of me, on the other side of the room behind like three walls was another bat.

https://i.imgur.com/E7aiWFV.jpg

I was facing right, towards the skeletons and instead I shoot STRAIGHT down towards the bat on the other side of the room, which is literally offscreen at the moment.

And the rest of my shots ALL went to the wall trying to shoot the bat over there.

And in this situation
https://i.imgur.com/hqr0t7T.jpg

I had an enemy I wanted to shoot on my right and another enemy behind me.
I was facing right and I shot to the left. This happens waaay too often.

Amazing. Truly.

I read the other reviews and was, like, okay, how bad could it be? And yeah, it’s about a little south of “meh” right now. This is not a “finished” game and it should be considered early access.

The story (or lack there of), the dungeon levels, the RPG progression, and the “Stardew Valley”-esque elements are so half-baked and forced together it is almost confusion. When playing, you want the game to make sense but it doesn’t.
Why does it take so long to get the fishing rod and what is the point of that and farming?
Why use any other tool when the grappling hook is clearly the best item in the game? (uses no stamina and no ammo)
What is the point of building all these generic homes for the generic townspeople in the bland land of Blands-ville?
Wait, so there are only like ~20 different enemies the game? For a $20 game? I’ve gotten better value from a free mobile game.
Why the artificial difficulty spikes? The most punishing thing in the game is when you bump into an enemy or trap.
The dungeons are waaaay more difficult than the “bosses”. I literally stood still and grappling hooked my way through most boss fights.
And and and yeah more.

All that said, I played through solo and I know that’s not the intended experience. I wanted to test the game out before recommending my girlfriend and I play it and I just ended up hate-finishing while hoping it would get better and it did not. I feel like I saved my girlfriend from this experience.

My verdict: I’ll come back when there is an update or when it’s more polished but I’ll burn all of Tasos to the ground if it’s paid DLC.

Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos is a rogue-lite adventure that's starting as a fun game and ends quite dead. It's buggy, lacks variations in classes, has unfinished content and is overall unrewarding. Halfway through you come to a point where you either ditch the game or finish it because you feel like you've wasted your time already so just might do it till the end.

Visuals: neat, classic old-style adventure type. Just exactly what you would expect from the genre.

Sound: it's there but it's also easily forgotten after. Nothing special, but at least it's not annoying.

Story: not deep or unique, common for the genre.

Gameplay: lacks content (as-in, there are dull placeholders for cut out or unreleased content). There are places you can't go and things you can't do yet the game is not an Early Access title (experimental patch 1.7 at the time of this review).

Difficulty: I don't think there was a way to change the difficulty unless I totally missed it. As it was, it's unbalanced from my point of view. Starting curve was good: you lose, you grind for upgrades, you progress. About 40% into the game you become too powerful with some classes making you nearly invincible while you keep on getting tons of resources for further upgrades. Turns the second half of the game into a walk in a park.

UI: bad. Lots of tools without easy navigation through them. You have to scroll through them without any way to rearrange them or access specific tools quicker. And those are not optional, you have to use them often. You can't get some information about the game elements through UI (spell descriptions after you've acquired them, for example).

Other: there are collectibles hidden around the game world which are utterly useless except for achievement hunters. There are game breaking bugs that make you abandon your run and start dungeon over.

Summary: buggy game that's either unfinished (you can finish the story line but there are lots of placeholders still lying around) or implies that there would be paid content for what's missing (if it's free, see p1.). Fun level drops too fast, can't recommend.

This game initially seemed to capture some of the feel and greatness of A Link to the Past, but after a while showed itself to be a hollow and badly designed experience, despite nice visuals.
The combat is ok, but the puzzles are far below TLoZ's level, and you have to do the same ones again and again in the dungeons which is very tedious. It's a pain to use the items as you can only equip one at once.

played 4-player co-op, nicest thing i can say is the game feels unintentional. instead of having to make decision on how to spend our points, we bought everything after a few dungeon runs. there a bunch of classes but the basic sword swing is the only effective sustained damage, making every class that isn't the best at sword-swinging useless. a ranger that excels with the bow but 6 hours in and still cannot craft the bow, a witch that enhances potions but you have one single-use potion and it's a grind to refill, a mage with spells that are at best actively harmful to your team. "procedural dungeons" but you'll see the same room multiple times on a floor and throughout the dungeon. the sword has an incredibly short-range and you'll take most of your damage by touching the enemy you're trying to hit. particularly in multiplayer when you bump the enemy into your waiting teammate. game is a failure at the most basic level on top of feeling incredibly unfinished. avoid at all costs.