Rogue Legacy
Review

Rogue Legacy (2013) is a dungeon-fighting game. Each time you die you go back to the start. However, you are resurrected as a character with different challenges: colourblind, dyslexic, a dwarf and so on. You can use gold, collected from previous lives, to offset this with abilities like flight, dash and air jumping, as well as equipping weaponry and armour.

The gameplay is intentionally hard. You have to solve some puzzles, kill enemies and make precise jumps. Each time you take on the dungeon it gets generated afresh. This, along with the 60 different enemies and 8 character types, ensures it doesn’t get stale no matter how many times you play. And each time you play, and inevitably die, you return with more gold to spend on enhancements for the next run.

It’s an interesting game about persevering through inherited benefits and hindrances from our family line. It embraces that no one is perfect and you don't need to be perfect to succeed.

Rogue Legacy 2 offers an enhanced visual style, more weapons and varied environments. It offers deeper progression through permanent upgrades to access deeper dungeons. It also enhances the traits system that determines the impairments for the next generation.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Rogue Legacy 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Ben Kendall and updated 5 months ago.