Game Review - Rogue Legacy (Xbox One, 2015)

I picked up Rogue Legacy when it was first released on Steam last summer and started playing it immediately.  Next thing I knew, the sun had come up.  I play a lot of games, and while I will often get deeply invested in them, it's rare that I will completely lose track of time like that.

When the game was released for the Xbox One last week, I downloaded it and did the exact same thing.

That's already a strong testament to the overall quality of Rogue Legacy.

But let's talk a little bit about why Rogue Legacy is so compelling:

On paper, the game sounds unlike most others - you take control of a knight who, along with a long string of his heirs, explore a constantly-shifting castle to liberate the treasures within.  When a character dies, his or her possessions are passed on to the next generation with a simple catch: to enter the castle, an adventurer must relinquish all the gold in his or her possession.  Thus, each generation must spend their inheritance immediately or lose it all.

The result is a surprisingly deep experience.  The game's learning curve can afford to be somewhat steep because your characters will slowly improve as you learn to control them more skillfully.

Because of this one simple feature, Rogue Legacy is a tough (and therefore satisfying) platformer.  When you start running, jumping, swinging your sword, and occasionally flying through the randomly-generated castle, basic enemies and obstacles will pose a significant threat.  You can spend your hard-earned gold improving skills or purchasing upgrades to make your offspring stronger, more resilient, and even more maneuverable, eventually making the hardest of foes trivial bumps in the road.

Rogue Legacy's skill... manor?

As you explore the castle's four unique zones, you will discover blueprints or fairy chests.  Blueprints give your armorer the information necessary to craft new swords and armor, while fairy chests contain runes that your enchantress can apply to your gear to give certain bonuses, like mid-air jumps or increased movement speed, but only if you can complete a challenge first.  The combination of enchantments and equipment give you a lot of customizability, allowing you to emphasize your particular style of play.

When a character dies, you'll get to choose an heir from three possibilities.  Each will be of a class you've unlocked, covering the traditional RPG spectrum - some are agile and powerful but can't take a beating, others sacrifice strength for a larger HP pool, and some focus powerful magic spells.  The selection of classes is random, so you'll be forced to try new ones on occasion.

Of course, if you don't like the classes you're stuck with, you can just die immediately and try your luck in the next generation.

Offspring also demonstrate some of the game's unique humor.  Each character will have up to two traits.  Some have positive effects, like OCD restoring some MP whenever you destroy one of the random doodads throughout the castle.  Some are distinctly negative, like near-sightedness causing the outer portions of the screen to be blurry (unless you can find some Nerdy Glasses to correct that condition).  Some of your characters will be bald or gay, which has absolutely no impact on gameplay.

Sir Cohen the Near-Sighted begins his legacy.

These traits add another layer of complexity to choosing your next-of-kin, and a few of the effects might make you chuckle.

Speaking of the game's humor, the story is told through a series of journal entries you may find scattered throughout the castle.  There aren't too many of them, and they're pretty brief, but they're well written.

To make each trek through the castle enjoyable, the game's control scheme is nearly flawless.  Responsive and intuitive controls make precision movements a true test of skill, so it's hard to blame your failure on bad design.  There is one place where I think it falters a bit because it's too sensitive, but that only comes up with a specific set of enchantments in specific scenarios; I only encountered this once, and I've put over 30 hours into the game, so it's a pretty minor complaint.

As for the challenges you'll face, there are four distinct sections of the castle, each with its own array of baddies and a boss to top it off.  For the most part, the game proceeds as a typical 2D platformer, except that the world changes structure each time you die.  Thankfully there are some constants to keep things from getting overwhelmingly complicated (the forest is always to the right of the entrance area, for example).

The castle's forest, complete with headless horse leaving a flaming wake.

In total, you can probably expect your first playthrough to take 7-10 hours as you develop your characters (and your skills) to tackle the bosses.  There's a lot more to do, though, if you're up to the challenge.

The most obvious is the classic "New Game +" option.  After defeating the final boss, you can start over with all of your previously-unlocked goodies.  This time, however, all monsters are replaced with their more advanced counterparts, upping the challenge all around.  If you finish the game again, you're treated to "New Game +2," further increasing monster levels.  As far as I know, there's no limit to how high you can go, but the game gets absolutely brutal before too long.  If you're looking for a hardcore challenge, Rogue Legacy will happily deliver.

Remixed bosses are a less infinite way of testing your skills.  It's possible to obtain artifacts that unlock alternate versions of bosses, which you'll fight using a pre-defined character (so you can't grind out gold for a stronger character) in a modified version of the boss's usual arena.  These are significant challenges, and beating them is among the most satisfying gaming experiences I've had in the last few years.

Here's a video depicting my eventually successful run against one of the remixed boss fights to give an idea of how it goes (it definitely took 20+ attempts to reach this point):


Rogue Legacy offers more than enough content to keep you busy for 20 hours or more, if you're up for the challenge.

And finally, it's worth noting that the visual style and soundtrack are fantastic.  Graphically, the game is quite simple and nostalgic, but the different areas are diverse enough and the sprites are detailed enough to look pretty good overall.  The sound effects are pretty solid, too, with good audio cues for various hazards and the like.

The music is a slam dunk.  The different themes for different areas and bosses do a great job of accentuating the action and enhancing tense boss battles.  It sounds awesome.

What I'm trying to say is that Rogue Legacy is amazing.  Great gameplay with surprising depth, awesome challenges, and solid replay value make for a fantastic game.  I can't possibly recommend it more highly.

My Rating: 10/10 - epic.

Achievement Guide - Scotomaphobia in Rogue Legacy

This achievement is for defeating Neo Khidr, the remixed version of the game's first boss (in the Castle area of the map).

To unlock this boss fight, you must defeat Khidr and then obtain the Khidr Obol, which is a random item you might receive when praying at a shrine.

One of these things.

The next time you try to enter the castle, Charon will comment on the Obol and take it from you.

Next, you need to find the Castle boss room.  Usually the doors to boss rooms will be closed after you defeat the boss, but once you give Charon the corresponding Obol, the room will reopen.  If you enter, you'll be taken to this special remixed boss fight.

The remixed bosses are the hardest challenges in the game by far.  In each, you'll play as a special character, so you can't just grind out gold to get a better dude.

A shot of the arena. It's much smaller than the area where you fought Khidr, and there are more spikes along the floor.

For Neo Khidr, you get Lady McSwordy, a level 0 Spellsword with ADHD (so she moves faster) and Vertigo (though she's wearing Nerdy Glasses to cancel that effect).  Her basic stats are:

248 HP
50 MP
35 Strength
232 Intelligence

and she comes equipped with several runes:

Vault (double jump)
Sprint (dash)
Siphon (gain MP for kills - totally irrelevant here)
Bounty (more gold from drops - also irrelevant)
Haste (moves faster)

For the more visually inclined, here's a screenshot of her stat page:

Lady McSwordy in all her glory.

Basic Strategy
This fight is brutal.  While Neo Khidr's attack patterns are the same as the original, the smaller arena and more aggressive attacks (less downtime between attacks, more projectiles when he does attack) make survival tricky.

The most basic element of the strategy is to spam the "Empowered" version of her spell.  empowered spells are cast using the "Special" attack for the character ("Y" button on Xbox One).  Each use costs 30 MP, but hitting him with your sword recovers 10 MP.

For reference, however, a regular attack deals 35 damage; the empowered spell deals 232 damage 6 times.  You're only using normal attacks to get the MP necessary to use the empowered spell.

Also note that the normal version of the spell only deals 116 damage 6 times.  You could use it, but it'll take twice as long to defeat him.

So, the plan is to jump around the stage dodging projectiles and hit him with your empowered spell.  Use regular attacks to recover MP.

Attack Patterns

Now, the Khidrs have three basic attack patterns:

First, he'll fire his projectiles out in a spiraling pattern, either moving clockwise or counterclockwise.  Once you get the hang of it, this is actually the easiest attack to dodge.  The basic plan here is to dash over the spikes on the bottom of the stage or over Khidr itself to make it to safety.  You'll have to play around with it a little bit to get a feel for where you should stand and how you should move, but it will mostly screw you up when you're not in a good position when he starts this attack.

The reason you may not be in a good position is that you may have been dodging his second attack pattern - firing projectiles outward in a uniform pattern.  The problem here is that the projectiles start close enough together that you're going to need to be in one of the corners of the room to avoid them.  The easiest place to do this is in the upper corners while standing on one of the floating platforms, but if you're up there when he starts the spiral attack, you're almost certainly going to get hit.  You'll need to use the double jump ability to maneuver around this pattern.

The best attack pattern is the one where it fires projectiles outward in a random pattern.  This is the best simply because it has the largest gaps between projectiles, meaning you're most likely to be able to get in some good damage.  In fact, you may occasionally not need to move off one of the floating patterns during this attack, allowing you to do some serious damage.

In the end, dodging Neo Khidr's attacks takes some mastery of both double jumping and dashing.  I actually found that the controls were a little too sensitive at times, so I was accidentally dashing at really bad times.

You'll have to practice to get the controls and important moves down.  I recommend waiting until you've completed a New Game +; at that point, you will likely be pretty adept at dodging attacks, so you won't have as big a gap to cross to be able to beat this thing.

Furthermore, I recommend practicing this fight repeatedly until you get there.  It's a quick one, and if you die, the game drops you right outside the room again, so you can retry very quickly.  Obviously you should take a break if you're getting overly frustrated, but keeping at it will get you there eventually.

To show some of these ideas in action, here's a short clip I recorded using the default Xbox One DVR.  It shows some of the maneuvers, but I only got the second half of the fight.

If I can figure out how the DVR thing works, I might go back and try to record a full run.

Quick Summary

• Spam the Empowered Spell ability, as that's what will deal the most damage.
• Use regular attacks to regenerate MP.
• Survival is the most important thing - focus on dodging its projectiles, and only attack when you get a brief opening.
• For the spiral attacks, dodge with combinations of double jumps and dashes, going either over or under its body as appropriate.
• For the uniform outward attack, try to get into one of the corners and double jump to avoid projectiles.
• For the random outward attack, try to get onto one of the floating platforms and attack as much as possible.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of these tips or if you have any suggestions of your own.

Good luck!

Game Review - Mega Coin Squad (Xbox One, 2015)

I'm always interested in new platformers.  The best ones have simple gameplay, so they're easy to pick up and play, but also have relatively high skill ceilings, rewarding practice with bonus levels or extra challenges, making for a good experience for players of all types.

Mega Coin Squad is not one of those games.

The premise is promising: you play through a series of levels that are effectively 2-dimensional arenas bounded by walls on either side.  Each level will challenge you to collect a certain number of coins and deposit them in a giant piggy bank somewhere in the stage.

Pictured: a giant piggy bank in it's natural environment.

Additionally, each stage is very dynamic, with new sections disappearing and spawning over time.  These vanishing sections provide an infinite number of coins to collect, but also introduce obstacles in the form of monsters or spikes.  Get hit three times, and you'll have to start all over; collect and bank the required number of coins, and you move on to the next stage.

On paper, it sounds like exactly the kind of thing I like to see.  It's a simple premise that's easy to understand but offers the opportunity for ever-increasing complexity to challenge the most adept of players.

Here's the problem: the game only has 16 levels, and each can be completed in 2 minutes or less.  After playing through the game a couple of times, even the last few stages were pretty simple.

The overworld clearly displaying the first four stages. This area is a quarter of the entire game.

Of course, there are leaderboards where you can compare your fastest completion time with the best players in the world.  There are also several playable characters (though they differ in fairly minor ways), and you can work towards getting perfect ratings in each level by not losing any lives and banking all the necessary coins in one go, but that's basically it in terms of replay value.

I felt like I had completely exhausted everything the game had to offer within 5 hours of game time, and that was after replaying the game with each of six different characters (which really wasn't particularly fun after the second time).

To be fair, the game's mechanics are pretty deep.  In addition to the standard running and jumping, your character can throw fireballs, dash in any direction (including up and down), and jump off walls, allowing for some pretty complicated maneuvers.  You can even upgrade those abilities with a Super Mario Bros. 3-style slot machine for getting good ratings, giving some degree of customization.

It's just that the content is much too shallow to support a complex (and frankly enjoyable) movement system.  Once you develop some skill with the game, nothing is left to challenge you, so there's no point in playing anymore.

A new section spawns to the right of our fearless protagonist.

There's also one really damning problem: there seems to be a memory leak issue, where the game gets intolerably laggy after playing for more than 20 minutes.  For a game with such a simple aesthetic, this lag is unacceptable, especially considering that most of the game's "content" comes in the form of rushing through the game quickly.

In the end, the first hour or so was pretty fun, but Mega Coin Squad loses its luster quickly.  It's worth checking out if you can play the game at no cost, but anything more than a few dollars feels excessive for the underwhelming experience you'll get.

My Rating: 3/10 - bad.

Game Review(ish) - Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition (Xbox One, 2014)

Over the weekend, I acquired an Xbox One.  Naturally, the first game I played was the One version of the highest-rated game I've reviewed for this blog: Guacamelee.

Seeing that I already reviewed the game once, I'll just note any major differences I experienced instead of writing a full review:

There aren't any.  This game is just as fantastic on the One as it was on the 360.  Do yourself a favor and play it.

My Rating: 10/10 - epic.

Game Review - Microsoft Jackpot (2014, Windows 8)

You know how everybody's favorite gameplay mechanics are the ones that are totally random?  Have you ever wondered how epic a game consisting entirely of random elements could be?

Well, friend, you need not wonder any more - Microsoft Jackpot is the "game" that will fulfill all your mildest dreams!

I'm not going to beat around the bush on this one.  Microsoft Jackpot is a slot machine simulator.  That's it.  Unless you're looking for an outlet for your gambling addiction, there's absolutely no reason for you to "play" this "game."

But that's no fun...  Instead, let's talk about features: You can unlock five different skins for your slot machine, including one that resembles a spy thriller and one that turns the slots into a candy factory.  Talk about purely aesthetic value!

The "Year of the Dragon" skin. Note the convenient "autoplay" so you don't even have to push "Spin" to keep "playing!"

How do you unlock these superficially different machines?  By spending imaginary money, of course!  Your in-game "experience level" seems to be completely determined by the total bets you've made, and as it increases, you'll get access to the new machines and higher bet amounts.  The more you sink into this "game," the more you'll be able to spend on a single spin of the slots.

You may be thinking, "this game already sounds amazing; sign me up!"  Well, hold on to your butts because there is even more!

If you're lucky, each of the slot machine skins will randomly send you to a unique interactive minigame.  You'll get things like "pick a gem" or "choose a bubble."  Even better, these minigames are usually rigged against you, just like real-life slot machines!  It really is the full gambling experience right in your very own home!

Click a gem...

...and choose a bubble!

Now, you may have noticed a startling omission in my description of this "game."  How do you get more coins to keep playing when you run out?

It's simple, friend - you purchase some with real cash money!  Alternatively, you can watch a commercial once every half hour, but then you may run out of coins and be forced to stop while you wait for your next advertisement.  Definitely not a good way to "play."

They even point out the transaction that gives you the most for you hundred and fifty dollars.  How helpful!

You can also get "lucky clovers" from the Jackpot Store.  As far as I can tell, those clovers bestow the most marginal of benefits, but every tenth of a percent helps, right?

 Seriously, that's it.  Watch commercials (or spend real-life monies) so you can click on things that provide totally random outcomes regardless your input.  It's insulting to call this a "game."

My Rating: 0/10 - totally worthless.

Game Review - Risen 3: Titan Lords (Xbox 360, 2014)

Risen 3 suffers from what I like to call the "Chrono Cross syndrome" - it's technically an acceptable game, but even at its best moments, it's a disappointment when taken in the context of earlier games in the series.  It ultimately fails to reproduce the engrossing elements that captured my attention when playing the original Risen, despite giving a smoother experience.

First, the good news: The mechanics of Risen 3 are easily the best of the series so far.  It's still a third-person action RPG, and the gameplay has the same general feel, but the whole thing is much more natural and fluid.

The biggest improvement is the addition of a dodge ability.  Instead of being stuck blocking attacks while your enemies dance around you, your character can now dive to the side to avoid taking damage.  While the game still gets frustrating in a few places, this simple addition makes combat a hell of a lot less tedious.

Most of the other basics come straight from Risen 2.  You are again playing as a pirate (a new protagonist this time, though still nameless), and early on you'll get a ship that will let you travel between the game's different areas.  The ship travel is little more than a gimmick for transitioning between otherwise similar regions, but it certainly doesn't get in the way.  You'll also assemble a crew, then you can take a single shipmate with you as you go adventuring inland, and you'll earn experience that you can apply directly to improving your major attributes.

Another nice change is that Risen 3 merges the previous games' magic systems.  You can build a character strong in Voodoo (Risen 2's only source of magic) or you can focus on traditional elemental magic from the first Risen game.  Of course, you could forgo magic altogether and instead develop a strong melee or ranged fighter, or you could grab some skills in each category for a more balanced character.  Those choices didn't strike me as hugely important, but they were a little better fleshed out than in the past.

On the gameplay side of things, that's pretty much it - nearly all the quests are trivially straightforward with in-game quest markers, and you don't get many interesting choices along the way.  Despite the lack of depth, it's as entertaining as any other RPG with decent real-time combat.  A couple boss fights break up the pace a bit, but the main appeal will be fighting monsters and following the story.

And that's where the disappointment sets in.

At the end of the introductory area, the player character dies.  A couple weeks later, a mostly-crazy mystic revives you, but your soul has been lost to the spirit world.

From (nearly) the start, your main motivation is retrieving your soul.  Along the way, you'll have to make deals and help members of various factions, all while trying to figure out how to restore yourself.

That got me all excited because it was reminiscent of Risen's plot, where everything stemmed from the protagonist's desire to survive following a shipwreck.  The letdown, made worse by my anticipation from similarities to the first game, is that the major plot points slip away from that initial motivation.

The latter half of the game is filled with sudden problems you'll have to solve (and at least one bait-and-switch) that don't fit smoothly into the narrative of finding your lost soul.  These random plot points destroyed my immersion in the game world, and the last third of the story felt more like a chore than an epic conclusion.

In short, the storyline starts strong but fizzles near the game's midpoint.  After seeing how well a similar sort of story played out in Risen, it's sad to see this one flail around in the final acts.

Add some awkward glitches (like the game hanging every time I tried to save in the final area, resulting in corrupted save files), and you have a game that is solidly in the range of mediocrity - it's decently amusing for a good chunk of it's 20 hour length, but it will likely bore you well before its lackluster conclusion.

My Rating: 4/10 - mediocre.

Game Review - Risen 2: Dark Waters (Xbox 360, 2012)

While a generally enjoyable experience, Risen's gameplay was riddled with flaws.  Its sequel, Risen 2: Dark Waters, inherits nearly all of those flaws, but it also loses many of the features that made its predecessor engrossing and satisfying.

Risen 2 picks up a few years after the events of the first game, opening with the nameless protagonist awaking from a drunken stupor.  Between the two games, he became a member of the Inquisition forces, relocated to the capital city, and donned an eyepatch (though the latter is never discussed).

It turns out that there are still some Titans wreaking havoc on the world in various ways.  The protagonist's commanding officer sends him on a mission to find a magical artifact capable of defeating the most pressing of these mystical threats to humanity -  the one whose krakens keep sinking Inquisition ships.

To make things a bit more convoluted, the Inquisition has no information about this mythical weapon except that some pirates may possess it.  Naturally, the pirates won't deal with the Inquisition directly, so the player character is formally discharged from the Inquisition (but not really, wink wink) and left to work with Patty (the daughter of a pirate from the first game) to find and secure the necessary weapons.

Oh, yeah, and somewhere between the two games, "traditional" magic was outlawed and the mages exiled, leaving Voodoo as the only viable source of magic in the game.  And the protagonist naturally forgot all the non-magic skills he acquired over the course of the first game.

I've described the basic plot in some detail (though all that I mentioned is revealed in the first half hour of play) because I think it's a little ridiculous for the sequel to Risen.  Between the games, the narrative transitions from fantasy to sea shanty, and it feels really weird coming off the heels of the first game.

Your character starts with nothing and must earn NPCs' respect in order to progress the plot.  While a nice idea, it doesn't feel very organic because the whole thing is tinted with the "but I'm really just using you to get what I want vibe."  In Risen, you got to choose your alliances before getting the game's most important tasks, and then those tasks were colored by your choices; here, the task is set in front of you from the start, and your only opportunities to make choices seem insignificant by comparison.

My point is just that this storyline is neither interesting nor engrossing.  And the script and voice acting are pretty bad at times, which doesn't do the game any favors.

It's worth noting, however, that the story probably isn't too bad if taken in isolation.  Seeing that I played Risen 2 shortly after completing the first game, however, the whole thing is laughably inappropriate.  It's clear that the storyline is a slave to certain gameplay mechanics (more on that in a moment) and a desperate attempt to recreate the feeling of exploration and discovery that made the first game so much fun.

It wasn't worth it.

The basic gameplay is the same as in Risen.  You'll control the anonymous hero from a third-person perspective, you'll interact with NPCs and try to solve their problems, and you'll fight off monsters (primarily large birds, monkeys, and humans - this is a pirate's tale, after all).

The questing aspect is fine, though most of the quests don't require any real exploration or insight.  Instead, you just need to talk to the relevant NPCs and follow quest markers on your map.  Standard RPG fare these days.  A handful of quests are a bit more interesting, giving only cryptic descriptions of relevant information, but they make up a small fraction of the available content.

Combat, on the other hand, is hideous.  My biggest complaints from Risen persist here: enemies almost always have the upper hand because your attacks won't cause them to falter, but a single blow against you will interrupt whatever you're doing.  They're also generally blocking masters or more agile than you, making most encounters frustrating and tedious.  Surprisingly, your blocks aren't nearly as effective as they were in the first game; it seemed that creatures are always able to attack through your blocks, so those fights always devolved into button mashing affairs in the hopes of overwhelming my opponents.

Furthermore, Voodoo is your only form of magic (there's that plot sneaking in), but it doesn't have any direct damage spells like fireballs or lightning bolts, as far as I could tell.  As a result, your combat options are limited to melee attacks and guns (guns!), though the latter tends to be dangerous due to relatively low damage output and long reload times.

The result is very little diversity in ways to approach combat successfully.

On the bright side, the developers managed to resolve one potential frustration from the previous game.  You can invest experience points you earn directly into your 5 primary attributes (swords, guns, toughness, cunning, and voodoo), and there's no limit to how much you can earn.  Trainers will teach additional skills, but those skills don't require and XP - you just have to meet the requisite level of the related attribute and pay the fee.  This system makes it easier to change skill paths if you decide you've done something wrong, so it's hard to get stuck fighting powerful monsters with nothing but high charisma.

That said, most of the secondary skills aren't very interesting, as they just boost statistic values in some way as opposed to unlocking new abilities.

Risen 2's big new addition is really just a gimmick based on the pirate theme: The game spans several small islands and coastal regions instead of one contiguous area.  Once you get your very own ship, you can sail back and forth between these areas at will.  While thematically appropriate, it limits exploration (particularly early, before you have a ship) and makes the whole thing feel like there's not a lot going on.

Part of the reason this setup feels restricting is that the individual areas don't have a whole lot to offer.  In Risen, you could wander through (almost) the entire map right at the start.  Sure, you could end up in a temple with demons that could easily defeat you, but that possibility was part of the fun.

In Risen 2, each island has 3 or 4 major areas and a lot of dead space.  They are much bigger than they need to be, with tons of forest paths or beaches that do nothing beyond adding area to the map.  It gets to a point where the exploration is as tedious as the combat, so the game doesn't offer much worth experiencing.

To top it all off, a few glitches may further compound the frustration.  Some are holdovers from the first game, like lag after every kill and lag when loading a save, but some are also new, as my game crashed occasionally at apparently random times.

The presentation is a bit of a mixed bag.  The voice acting and character models (particularly faces) get pretty awkward, but the soundtrack does a fantastic job creating the right kind of pirate-y atmosphere.  The various environments look pretty good, especially distant landscapes, in part due to lots of details like foliage.

When you put it all together, Risen 2 is clearly more technically advanced than its predecessor (most obviously evidenced by the graphical quality), but it doesn't apply those advancements where they are needed the most.  The gameplay is tedious at best, and the story is solidly mediocre.  It's not really worth playing unless you're desperate to continue the Risen saga, and even then, it might be better to pretend this one doesn't exist.

My Rating: 3/10 - bad.