Recent reviews by Devil's Advocate

It's... fine.

I grew up playing Road Rash for the Genesis and *some* of this game scratches some of that itch. The elements from *outside* of Road Rash feel pretty bad to me. Having a block button in melee doesn't feel great to me. Enemies blocking you even when you hit them in the middle of their attack animation feels bad. Rubberbanding works to make them slow down as you approach but also to speed them up as you start to creep past them and this makes it harder to get away from enemies than it needs to be (if you get surrounded you might hit the break to avoid getting hit, only to find the enemies magically stay close to you because of the rubberbanding). The rogue-like elements feel undercooked and uninspired. 5% extra attack this run? Oh boy sign me up.

Once you get out of the opening area you start hitting maps that feel more Carmageddon inspired than Road Rash, for better or worse. It takes forever to unlock new bikes and they don't seem especially interesting. You carry a bunch of weapons on you instead of stealing them from other bikers, which would be more interesting if they made more use cases. "Stage hazards" like cars falling from the sky, combined with a low camera angle, make it possible to drive into unavoidable crashes. The crashes themselves seem to have too little consequence for the rider, whereas getting sandwiched between two enemies can end a run in seconds. Lots of questionable design choices here.

I enjoyed the first couple of hours and then burned out on it.

A short and sweet resident-evil like experience with a really solid story. I wasn't big into Resident Evil when I was young, but I think this game has helped me understand some of its appeal.

Aggressively repetitive, with no ability to save, and no progress to carry over between games. I don't think repetitive is 'bad' in a beat-em-up style game, necessarily, but considering you're locked into more than an hour of mashing the X button against very similar looking enemies with no way to back out without losing your progress I can't recommend it.

Edit- They've added saving into the game now. Although I still find the combat repetitive, it is now possible to play in short bursts, which makes the game less tedious. At this point I'm more comfortable 'recommending' the game.

If you enjoy reading-heavy RPGs you'll likely be thrilled with this game. The game is essentially a sophisticated gamebook with a lot of content and lots of opportunities to 'role play.' The visuals are minimal but the writing is extraordinary and the gritty setting is exciting and mysterious.

In another review I saw somebody suggest that this game deserved space on the same shelf as Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium. In gameplay it's closer to Elysium, in writing it's closer to Torment. I love them all, and I would happily recommend this game to anyone who enjoyed either experience.

It's good, and it's cheap, and you should play it.

It's fairly good, but it could be better. I'm writing this on July 16th and I imagine in the future it'll improve from where it is, but where it is isn't bad. I've mostly enjoyed my time with the game. The gripes I have so far have to do with visual indicators and run randomization. Your screen may flash red before a sniper fires at you to warn you of your impending doom, but an explosive about to go off under your feet may not be visible to you at all if you're angling your camera upwards to deal with an enemy above you. Bosses will create giant red circles on the ground indicating where they're about to attack, which is super useful, but I'm not convinced I have enough time to actually get out of the way of every attack. It may be that the hitbox isn't 100% lined up with the giant circle, or maybe strafing isn't as fast as turning and running, I'm not sure. I'm sure I've had some frustrating deaths to attacks I was waiting for, saw happening, and responded to.

The characters are fairly varied but individual runs with those characters can feel fairly samey. Each character seems to have about two viable 'builds' although the pieces of those builds can be slightly different on each run. You may not find the '200% damage' upgrade for your secondary skill, but you might find a bigger AOE for the explosive damage for your secondary skill. Either way you're going to be leaning into using that skill if you're taking those upgrades, but how you use the skill will change slightly.

I look forward to seeing what they do moving forward once they get some of the paid DLC they are working on out of the way.

It's a fun, gimmicky indie game. It'll keep your attention. The card game itself is all right. I like it.

If I could thumbs-sideways this game I would. This game sits somewhere between "fine" and "good" for me. I think it looks and plays all right but it doesn't really stand apart from anything else. The original Rogue Legacy was a fantastic game in 2013, but this feels like a sequel from 2014. We've had 9 years of amazing Roguelikes and combat platformers over the last nine years, but it feels like Rogue Legacy 2 was too busy copying the first game to find much inspiration outside of Hollow Knight. It's only really a thumbs-down from me because I think there are better roguelites and combat platformers out there already. I'll get a little more nuanced below.

The combat feels pretty similar to the first game while also feeling vaguely Hollow Knight inspired. Having played a great deal of Hollow Knight I frequently found myself attempting to play *this* game *that* way, which usually didn't end well for me. Hollow Knight features the ability to attack downwards to 'pogo' off of enemies and environmental hazards during platforming, whereas Rogue Legacy 2 gives you a 'spinkick' which you perform with down and jump which allows you to jump off of enemies and *some* specific environmental hazards. Hollow Knight features a 'shade cloak' upgrade which allows you to dash through enemies and projectiles to reposition during combat, whereas Rogue Legacy 2 features a very similar dash upgrade which allows you to dash through *some* enemies and *some* projectiles during combat. Hollow Knight allows you to attack above and below you whereas Rogue Legacy allows you attack up and down with *some* of the weapons but not most of them. I don't need Rogue Legacy to do exactly what Hollow Knight did with its combat, but I found the combat much tighter and more consistent in Hollow Knight. The approach in Rogue Legacy feels inconsistent. You can pogo off of *some* projectiles but not others, and you can dash through *some* things on the screen but not others, and this turns into kind of a mess once the game starts trying to mix platforming with bullet hell after the first couple of bosses.

Speaking of bosses, these bosses can feel like stat checks moreso than cool encounters. They have huge amounts of health and deal heavy amounts of damage in sequences that often feel like bullet hell. Most of the time you can get the pattern down and simply 'get good' to take down the boss with out needing to brute force your way through upgrades but the massive health pools make them feel like chores or endurance trials. I could hit them 100 times without upgrades or die 30 runs trying and eventually double my damage to make it easier. Upgrades do less to make me feel more powerful than they make me feel like I'm wasting less time getting around and fighting the bosses.

Speaking of the *upgrades*, this is the bit where Rogue Legacy 2 feels more like a Free To Play game than a roguelite to me. Every time you die you bring back your gold, and you can invest into permanent upgrades for your characters. You can buy and upgrade weapons and armor as well as skills on the 'skill tree.' Unfortunately the overwhelming majority of these upgrades are completely inconsequential in small doses. Sure, you can eventually double your damage output, but that isn't just a few upgrades to do. That's a new sword and about twenty damage upgrades on the skill tree worth of investment. Similarly, there are about 30 life upgrades, 40 armor upgrades, and a truckload of other upgrades for other systems in the game that feel like otherwise arbitrary limitations like weight restrictions or limitations on the aforementioned upgrades themselves. Is it fun to spend twenty minutes on a run and then die so you can spend all that money you gathered on an upgrade like, "2% more int scaling with food?" How about two more points of damage reduction on top of the 80 you already have? If those sorts of upgrades sound exciting to you you'll be right at home grinding away in this game.

I've been harsh here but I don't think the game is "bad," per se. I think it's just kind of rote I've done all this stuff before in games that handled each of those aspects a little bit better than this one. The endless grind for trivial stat increases makes dying feel tedious and boring instead of exciting. The 'variety' offered by the various classes the game offers feel less 'quirky and fun' and more like lists of restrictions and limitations to how I can play. This guy can't attack up or down? This one needs to spin kick off of his attacks to hurt anyone? Not the most inspiring group of characters. I did appreciate the lancer and chef classes, for how much more interactive they felt with the game than the others.

You might love it or you might think it's boring. You probably won't regret spending the money on it but you *might* end up disappointed with the final product.

It's an ARPG inspired by Diablo 2 with a huge amount of content to wade through if you're committed to seeing everything. It's actually way too much content, which is all far too similar... but if you're into the ARPG thing you might just be down for that. The game does have a learning curve, though, so be ready for that.

I'm writing this review at about 30 hours into the game. I'd normally wait until the end to share my thoughts but I've reached a point in the game where I'm losing motivation to finish it and may not make it all the way through.

The game has fantastic gameplay with below average writing and characters. My issues are not with the tropes or the cliches, but with the actual plot, setting, character motivations, and character development. I believe I could accurately boil down every character into a single sentence without losing any depth in the process. That could be totally fine if the writers actually chose to lean into the identities they gave to their characters, but 90% of the game's skits and cutscenes seem to be generic anime filler rather than meaningful character interaction. It feels like there are different writers involved in the story bits than there are in the rest of the game, and nobody wants to play it 'risky' by developing any of the characters out of turn.

Speaking of separate writing teams, I'm certain there were at least three separate writers in charge of writing for Shionne in the first few hours of the game. Her tone changes from scene to scene and her battle dialog doesn't line up with her victory dialog or her story dialog. The plot dialog is similarly jumbled in tone as the game progresses. We start with the main characters determined to "take down the lords" and end slavery. At one point they see a bunch of people happy and reconsider the entire plot of the game for about an hour before the game forces them to reconsider their reconsideration. Then you get a boss fight with a character the plot doesn't even need you to fight, because I guess we needed a boss fight, and after that boss fight everyone acts like it was totally fine that this character you literally came to town to murder just tried to murder all of you. About ten hours later we even get one of those fun "Rose" cutscenes similar to the end of The Last Jedi, where someone on your team is about to kill a villain and someone else on your team decides the heroic thing to do is step inbetween them and almost die saving the bad guy. You would imagine this means the bad guy wasn't actually all that bad, right? No, no, it was because the good guy was too angry when she attacked the bad guy, and her friend didn't want her to kill the bad guy angry. So he risked killing himself and traumatizing her to save the bad guy to stop her from getting her revenge on the evil bad guy.

At the end of that fight the whole team decides to chase and kill the bad guy that good guy just saved. That's where the writing is in this game. It's wherever it wants to be. The characters just follow along and say whatever needs to be said to make the plot happen. It isn't just 'generic,' or just 'anime,' or just 'JRPG' writing. It's spectacularly, embarrassingly terrible writing. It doesn't feel like it was 'made for kids,' it feels like it was made by some kind of anime trope algorithm.

Tales games aren't really the place to go for 'mature' or 'deep' writing but Tales of Berseria impressed me with its characters and its treatment of 'good' and 'evil.' The gameplay isn't up to par with Arise but if you really want to play something kinda like this, with some actual characters and plot points that you might carry around with you when you're done playing, try that.

It's a very cool runnin-around collectathon-style game with a compelling mystery in an awesome setting, with a solid payoff for all of the runnin-around at the end of the game. I'm excited to see where the developers go from here.