The generations-spanning roguelite returns
Even in its unfinished, early access state, Rogue Legacy 2 is shaping up to be a bigger and better version of the first Rogue Legacy in every way.
Cellar Door Games’ Rogue Legacy was one of the best indie platformers of the last decade, thanks to its simple, satisfying action and addictive gameplay loop that was enhanced by a clever roguelite design. Its sequel is in the works, but you can start playing it now. The $24.99 Rogue Legacy 2 is available via early access on the Epic Games Store and Steam, so we sank time into its 0.81 build. The PC game is already much bigger and more varied than the first Rogue Legacy, with a cleaner, smoother look that maintains the first game’s general aesthetic while moving beyond 16-bit-style sprites. Rogue Legacy 2 isn’t finished, so we won’t give it a formal score until it fully releases. Still, even in this early state, it’s a stable and fun platformer with plenty to do.
Rogue Legacy 2’s premise and concept are effectively identical to the first game’s. You’re a valiant adventurer sent to explore a ruined castle/kingdom, killing a number of bosses to unlock a door that leads to the final area. You die almost immediately, but that’s not a bad thing; in fact, it’s an essential game mechanic. Each time you die, the game randomly generates more powerful offspring.
This is a “roguelite,” which means the kingdom’s layout shifts wildly every generation (unless you lock down the layout at the expense of a significant percentage of the gold you collect). Instead of everything resetting each time you die, you build resources to progress deeper and deeper into the castle. The gold you collect is used to expand your keep, giving direct stat boosts to your characters, adding more classes to play, and enabling additional features and bonuses. Whatever gold you don’t spend before heading out in each generation is given to the ferryman, though a few of the keep upgrades let you save a small amount of that gold for later or let the gold you give away build up to further improve your stats. It’s a clever design that encourages exploration over raw grinding, since you can’t simply save up all your gold to get everything in one shot.
Rogue Legacy 2 piles on the content. In fact, it’s significantly larger than the first Rogue Legacy in its 0.8 version. There are six biomes (up from the first game’s four), and their layouts and mechanics are much more varied. The first area is a castle like in the first game, but then you move on to a horizontally sprawling seaside village, a snow-covered mountainside, and a magical tower. They aren’t all straight runs to the bosses of each area, either, and often require finding a specific ability, collecting certain items in a run, or beating mini-bosses before you can face your main target.
As you play through the game you’ll find heirlooms, special items that permanently enable new abilities, such as a double jump or a barrier-shattering air dash. This adds a hint of Metroidvania to the game, since each area usually needs a new ability to either access or complete. Heirlooms considerably upgrade mobility, so the earlier areas become easier to traverse and explore each time you get a new one.
Combat is drastically expanded in Rogue Legacy 2, thanks to the classes feeling distinct from each other instead of all having the same general sword-swinging mechanics tweaked with varied stats and secondary abilities. Every class is unique, with its own primary weapon that behaves differently.
Knights have the classic forward sword-swing from Rogue Legacy. Barbarians carry axes that cause critical hits, with slow overhead blows on the ground and spin attacks in the air. Valkyries tote spears that they can thrust in four directions. Archers and gunslingers can aim in any direction, but archers fire single, distant shots, while gunslingers shoot rapidly but need to reload. Bards are the most distinct and difficult to play, because they shoot musical notes that don’t do much direct damage, but spin kicking off each note hits every enemy around it. There’s also assassin, boxer, chef, dragoon, duelist, and ronin, and that’s not including variants of each class you can eventually unlock.
Initially, the action feels slightly floaty. It can take a few runs to grow accustomed to you and the enemies’ hit boxes, as well as the attack rhythms. It tightens up and feels much more precise once you get a few heirlooms to improve your mobility, and once you come to grips with each class’s speed, range, and abilities. It feels responsive and satisfying once you get into the groove, but there’s a bit of a learning curve between attacks, class abilities, spells, and spin kicks.
Like in the first game, your characters have various traits that can either benefit or hinder them. They can be bigger than usual, improving their range while making them a larger target, or smaller and vice versa. They could be vampires, that gain health with every hit, but take much more damage. They might simply jump higher, or knock enemies farther back.
It’s much more likely that a trait will get in the way, but even that has its advantages. A nostalgic adventurer will make you play through that generation with a sepia-tone filter over the screen. Having vertigo will completely flip the screen upside-down. Divas only have the spotlight on them, darkening the rest of the screen except for enemies, which have smaller spotlights. These negative effects can make the game harder, but they offer gold bonuses as a trade-off, and those bonuses can be increased by building up your keep. Being colorblind gives just 25 percent extra gold, but having the trait that causes one hit to kill you provides at least 200 percent more gold on that run. It makes accepting the worst traits not just a challenge, but a potential boon.
Rogue Legacy 2’s graphics are a significant step up from the first Rogue Legacy’s visual design. Everything looks like a hand-drawn cartoon, much sharper and more colorful than the previous game’s 16-bit-style sprites. Only the backgrounds are hand-drawn, however; the various characters and objects are 3D models with heavy shading and thick outlines to look more like 2D animations. Projectiles, dashing, and other parts of the action really pop out with glowing effects that appear pseudo-3D, matching the rest of the game’s art.
The game uses shaded polygons, so its simple, cartoonish style isn’t very hardware-intensive; you can count on smooth performance even on less powerful hardware. Rogue Legacy 2 requires a PC with at least a 2GHz CPU, an AMD R9 280X or Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 GPU, 8GB of RAM, 2GB of storage, and the Windows 7 operating system. According to Cellar Door Games, recent integrated graphics cards should also be able to run the game. I didn’t see the framerate dip below 75 frames per second while playing on a gaming PC with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 GPU. I also didn’t see any glitches or bugs, despite it being an early access build.
As of version 0.81, Rogue Legacy 2 has all six of its main gameplay areas, with mechanics and bosses for each, along with 13 different playable classes and alternate weapons for more than half of them. It’s already much larger than the first Rogue Legacy, but this means it might not expand too far beyond its current state besides implementing the final boss (or bosses), and possibly an additional area to go with it. This also means the game can’t currently be completed; once you defeat the bosses of all six areas, the portraits around the golden door that lead to the final fight light up, but you won’t be able to progress because the content simply isn’t there yet. With that in mind, and because Rogue Legacy is still considered early access, we won’t give it a formal review score.
Still, even in early access I’ve spent more than 20 hours playing Rogue Legacy 2, and I still haven’t beaten the fifth boss or reached the sixth area. It’s already a fun, addictive, expansive roguelite platformer that will keep you coming back every time you die to get a little bit further and build up your keep a little bit higher. It’s fun and runs stably, and while you can’t finish it yet, it’s still an engaging experience with enough content to justify the $25 price. It’s perfectly reasonable to wait until the full version officially launches, though, especially if you’d like to play it on anything besides PC. Other versions haven’t been announced yet, but after the first Rogue Legacy launched on PC, versions for the iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita and Xbox One were released shortly thereafter. Since Rogue Legacy 2 doesn’t seem too resource-intensive, an eventual Switch port seems likely.
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Will Greenwald has been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over a decade, specializing in TVs, media streaming devices, headphones, game consoles, game accessories, and virtual reality. He’s reviewed well over 1,000 consumer electronics products and has written dozens of extensive guides to products in his fields.
His particular expertise is in TV and home entertainment technology. Will is a certified ISF Level III TV calibrator and THX Level I home theater installer, which ensures the thoroughness and accuracy of his TV reviews. In addition, he has also tested and reviewed every major game console and consumer VR headset of the last three system generations.
Will has been covering consumer technology for over 15 years. In addition to PCMag, his work and analysis has been seen in CNET, GamePro, Geek.com, Maximum PC, Sound & Vision, and other publications. He also enjoys fiction writing, photography, and building Gunpla model kits.
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