Rogue Legacy 2 Review

ign.com:

Back in 2013, the original Rogue Legacy added a revolutionary twist to the standard roguelike formula: Instead of losing everything upon death, you’re able to spend your currency on permanent upgrades that make each successive run just a little bit easier. This kickstarted an entire subgenre called roguelites, which now includes such incredible games as Hades, Returnal, Dead Cells, and many more. That’s a daunting landscape to return to nine years later, but Rogue Legacy 2 is a sequel that wisely doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel. Instead it successfully modernizes its look, premise, and mechanics to meet the heightened modern-day standards of the genre, and hones the design to razor sharpness.

Rogue Legacy 2 feels like a reimagined version of what that first game could have been with the benefit of more time, money, and hindsight of how the genre has evolved since 2009. The basic premise is still the same and still just as strong as ever: You play as a hero with a randomized name, class, and quirky trait; explore a massive, procedurally generated castle; collect loot; and attempt to beat bosses. When you die, you lose all the progress you made on that particular run (save for defeated bosses or unlocked portals), but you’re able to spend the loot you picked up to purchase a wide variety of permanent, yet incremental upgrades that get passed down to your next of kin.

So it’s very much the same blueprint, but virtually every individual aspect of that premise has been transformed for the better. For one, each class has their own distinctive weapon, talent, passive ability, and stats, making them play incredibly differently from one another from the jump. As an example, my favorite class, the Valkyrie, is super