Rogue Legacy 2

I may change this review at a later date, but based on my first few hours, I can't really say I recommend the game. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot going for the game, but for me personally, it didn't hook me the same as RL1, I think primarily because of scope-creep. [h1]The good:[/h1] - Beautiful environmental art style reminiscent of Hollow Knight. Definitely an upgrade compared to RL1. - A massive, semi open world procedural map to explore. - Could be a pro or a con. Same classic platforming gameplay, with a few new twists. - Tons of class types to unlock and try. - A moderate amount of game modifiers in the form of traits and relics to try and keep runs fresh. - Lots of incremental progression to keep you pushing. If you enjoy incremental progression games, this will hit for you. - House Rules to tailor the game to your liking. [h1]The bad:[/h1] - The base-difficulty makes the game tedious to progress through if you're not a platforming god. - The incremental progression system helps with that, but earning enough gold to really see an impact takes far longer than it should. The upgrades get progressively more expensive, and Gold gain is woefully small, despite the massive amount of incremental upgrades you can purchase. I cheated in some gold to see how much you need to buy all the upgrades, and it's literally something like 9999999 gold. Depending how good you are, in the early game you'll probably only be earning around 1000 gold, mid game you might earn 10000 gold a run. There's no House Rule to increase gold gain, so you're stuck spending hours running around maps looking for treasure chests. - Because of the focus on incremental upgrades, the game at it's core is a numbers game. Most upgrades are just (+X increase to stat), making you tankier and deal more damage, which isn't that interesting. - Unfortunately, after a few hours of playing, I started to get a feel for how the procedural map generation played out for the first area. Because I'm not a platforming god, and don't want to punish myself against HP spongy enemies and bosses, I quickly got mired in Area 1 as I attempted to farm gold and got bored of seeing the same enemies and room layouts. - Exploring the entirety of each Area also takes awhile to do (I'd say ~20-30 minutes to fully map out an area, which is a long time if you're not planning to lock a map seed and are expected to explore multiple areas in a run). Doing an extended run of the dungeon could take you anywhere from 2-4 hours, which is a large time commitment. - I'm not as young as I used to be, and the additional movement mechanics that were added in RL2 were difficult for me to adjust to. Too many different buttons to press to utilize all the movement mechanics meant that I struggled to complete more challenging platforming sections. I tried remapping keybinds on my keyboard, even switching to controller and still couldn't really find a good layout to map all the movement keybinds to. Someone with better reflexes will probably be fine with this. -