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26 June 2014 10:01 PM (games)
A little while ago Rogue Legacy was on sale on gog.com and it looked like fun, so I bought it. Today I ���finished��� it, by which I mean that I killed the big boss and get to start over. There are still a lot of things I can (try to) do, but the ���story��� is over.
So, at the start of this game you are a legendary knight and you go into this castle, for what reason is not explained until later. This game is about his children, somehow. At the end of the tutorial the knight dies and a child of his will take his place and walk into the very same castle, possibly to avenge their father.
Each time you die you get to pick a new child to work with, each has a class which affects certain stats and each may have one or two traits. These traits can be useful, funny, annoying or sometimes even make you sick. Some traits include being near-sighted, having no pulse in your feet or being a giant. They make for some interesting experiences and some laughs as well. Classes include a Paladin which isn���t particularly good at anything, an Archmage which has a lot of magic power, and a Knave which is pretty bad at everything except has a killer critical hit.
Every time you enter the castle it will normally be completely different from last time, save for a few constants. In my opinion this makes it vastly replayable, as every time you have to start over everything is new.
Thankfully this is not such a cruel game that every time you die you have to start over from scratch. Each run through the castle will result in some gold, this gold can be used by the next generation to buy some upgrades, and thus level up. So even if you are exceptionally bad at a game like this, as I probably am myself, you���ll still be able to make progress simply by trying over and over again. Of course there are also better armors and weapons to be bought and runes to be equipped to help you even more.
The gameplay is very nice. It���s very action/platform in nature as there is a lot of swinging of the sword, dodging of projectiles and jumping on platforms to be had.
Installation on linux
The game is available for linux, although since I bought it through gog.com I only had an option of windows or mac. I didn���t try asking the developers if they could let me download the linux version since I didn���t think to check if there was one until I was already well underway with my game.
It works in wine, version 1.7.20, at least. To install it in wine first you���ll need to have the proper XNA installed. On my Archlinux installation this was a matter if installing winetricks and then using it to install xna:
sudo pacman -S winetricks winetricks xna
I didn���t fully test it with a normal 64-bit wine prefix, but using a 32-bit one worked fine for me. After having installed XNA installation of Rogue Legacy went fine and I didn���t have any trouble playing it at any point. On my laptop that is a different story, I just can���t get it installed there, even though it���s the same version of everything I can think of (it also has Archlinux installed).
Conclusion
It���s a very nicely designed game, both visually and gameplay-wise. There are a lot of funny things in it and a lot of things for you to find. You start out thinking you���ll never ever be able to go through the entire castle (or at least I did) only to find that gradually you learn the enemies��� ways and get stronger and things get easier, and then you find a boss (and subsequently lose hope again, or at least I did).
It took me some 34 hours and some minutes to kill the big boss and 136 generations of heroes, it was my first play through and I have to say I was a little addicted during those hours, I haven���t played a game this much in a very long time.