Legacy Design

I. Hate. Rogue-likes. Losing progress - due to poor checkpoint placement, for example - is near the top of my list of general pet-peeves in games -- and the signature mechanic of a modern roguelike is losing all of your progress if you happen to slip up and die. (In retrospect, hey, Dead Rising was sort of a rogue-like wasn't it?) Rogue Legacy is commonly classified as a "rogue-lite," meaning it's a little more forgiving than all that; so I hoped I would be able to tolerate it. But I was wrong.

Rogue Legacy violates the death-resets-everything rule with purchasable upgrades. After you die, the money you've collected can be used to buy "manor" upgrades (which unlock new classes, or increase base stats); or, after finding blueprints or runes, to buy equippable items and skills. This sounds totally sensible in theory. But in practice, two of Rogue Legacy's core mechanics completely ruin it:

The "manor" upgrades become more expensive as you buy more of them (in other words, after investing in upgrade B, upgrade A will be more expensive than before).
After the upgrade-purchase process, but before re-entering the dungeon, Charon takes all of your money. (Yeah, exactly like Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know!).

So, after grinding my way to (fairly quick) death a few dozen times, new upgrades are actually more difficult to get than they were before, because the costs have risen so prohibitively. And it's impossible to gradually accumulate wealth, because, you can't. The more I play, the harder it gets. Bullshit.

I won't even get into how badly screwed you can get by the randomly-chosen class options (sometimes you just don't have any good options), and the randomly-generated dungeon layout (sometimes the first room is just a death trap). Rogue Legacy is designed to work against you. It is intentionally frustrating.

If you're into that sort of thing, then by all means, go for it. Personally -- I hate this shit.

Progress: Level 19, never killed any bosses