There aren’t really any experiences here that will become crystalized in my gaming memory, like finally defeating the seed of evil at the heart of Darkest Dungeon, or winning the grudging respect of my Underworld-ruling father in Hades. Within an hour of playing Rogue Legacy 2, it began to feel like I’d been playing it for years. This is a sequel, after all, to a game I never played but constantly heard referenced in the last decade, and it plays with the comfortably familiar warmth of a genre that I already know quite well. Very little it does is unique or novel, but it doesn’t really have to be. It may not be able to boast the emotionally satisfying narrative and relationship building of a genre-defining game such as Hades, but it does enough to keep driving the player forward, while embodying so many of the traits that have made me a rogue-like fan in recent years. Rogue Legacy 2 is certainly complex enough to keep the mind and fingers clicking away, with the sort of addictive feedback loop of progression that can easily keep the player grinding out “just one more run” until 2 a.m. It should probably not surprise one to learn that 40+ hours of play later, I clearly needn’t have worried. “How am I supposed to deal with such a limited bag of tools?” “I can only attack directly in front of me?” I was asking myself incredulously. It was the controls, just then, that had me scratching my head, and the inherent limitations of the game’s first available class, the Knight. It’s a question of whether I find myself gelling with a game’s controls, interface and flow of play during a relatively short window of attention, or whether one of those aspects is inherently grating or flawed.Īnd to be honest, there was a point around 15 minutes into Rogue Legacy 2 (newly released after two years of Early Access) that I almost exited the game and went trawling through the Steam refund policy. Call it a trial period, call it a vetting procedure-whatever you call it, those first few minutes are by far the most important period in determining whether I ultimately end up sinking hour after hour into a new PC title. There’s a bit of an odd feeling out process that happens for me, in the first 15 to 30 minutes of playing a new game.
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