Rogue Lords Reviews

This game does have a lot of cool ideas and innovative design. However, it's held back by a lot of things being half-baked, especially in the UI/UX department. For instance, you have god-like powers you can use at the cost of life-energy (you die when you run out of it). But using this is often very janky. You can drag a character's HP or SP bar, but you can't do so precisely especially for high-health enemies, which is very problematic and frustrating. No keyboard controls or numerical input given for this. Also, for some reason they blocked off the screen that tells you the cost of all the god-mode powers when you're in combat (which is where you need it the most!). Some other negatives: -Walking around the world map is tiresome and annoying because of hard-to-see paths between the trees. -VERY BUGGY! Even has some run-ending bugs. -Combat is a confused mess due to bad UI. While enemy intent is shown, it is way too vague when its a buff or debuff. -You can't quit to main menu when you're in a combat. Very annoying as combats can be quite long. The positives: -An innovative and new take on a roguelike. -Has good storytelling for the genre. -Art and music are satisfactory. Though the enemy models could use some more love. -Narration by the devil is well done. In the end, I can't recommend this one. You should only buy it if you want to try something new (it has a lot of unique ideas).

This is a thumbs medium, trending towards positive, but hoo boy I am not enjoying this thing enough to recommend it. Rogue Lords is a Slay The Spire like, only you can have three characters in a squad. You start with only three characters, unlocks are slow, and the first two characters you unlock are bad. You might see a design problem there, and yes. The whole game is like that. As with Iratus, a flawed game that I liked a whole bunch more, you're an evil mastermind trying to kill your way through the church. Enemies have sanity and health bars, encouraging you to focus your team comp around only damaging one type. Unlike Iratus, there's really no incentive for damaging sanity, and your starting team is oriented on health damage and the two sanity damage characters I've unlocked are bad and the sanity damage alternate skills on your main cast require you to spec into doing sanity damage instead, a changeover that is hugely resource intensive and will lose you your run. Let's talk about runs, btw. They're long as hell. They're also quite random. A punishing event or an unusually hard fight can lose you the run in a second. Do you see how this combination might feel bad? There's also an incentive to just... not get in fights. Every time you hit an event instead of a combat, you can get passive buffs to your damage output. When you do a combat, you might lose a bunch of resources, and the benefit is just... some skills or a random event down the road or something. You should do fights when there's a bonus one, but you're strongly incentivized to just avoid them on the map. Incidentally, let's talk about the game's skill checks. Do you know how often you should fail a 90% chance check? Should it be half of the time? I can't tell if this is a bug or badly communicated intentional design or I am sitting on a geological locus of bad luck, but I lose 80% and 90% checks most of the times I attempt them. The game does let you spend your boss hp to boost check chance, and I think these weirdly communicated check odds are meant to encourage you to only make checks when you have 100% chance of success. There's also a little bit of interface jank. Clicking on your units and clicking on their powers feels unreliable. The game is constantly putting you in little uninteractive micro-states where you can't click your stuff, so inputs get eaten. This won't cause you to lose matches, but compared to Slay The Spire's smoothness it genuinely grates. I think if your choice is between this and no games, it's better than no games. Nothing in Rogue Lords really shines, and there's a bunch of blemishes, but it hasn't crashed on me or anything. However it takes a ton of time to play, and I don't know if I've enjoyed that time. I think a sequel could really tighten up the concept, and I'd be willing to give it a try, but maybe wait on a deep sale for this one.