September 2022 Update

Next update (works only on profile page)

Activated: 07/2022

Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos (Q1 2021) ⭐️⭐⭐☆☆

Beaten after: 2 months

Rogue-lite
17,6 | 30 of 39 (77%)

⇱ Click to show summary⇲

The good
- Combat is simple and easy to learn
- Even when pixel style graphic is nice
- Works well as co-op

The bad
- No minimap
- Classes are useless
- Enemies and dungeons are copy-pasted a lot
- Generic story
- Unintuitive menus and navigation

Conclusion:
Is it playable? Yes. Is it good? No. The closest comparison to another game is Hammerwatch, and Hammerwatch is so much better. Rogue Heroes have combat that is simple, but also get repetitive fast. Classes that are useless and there is no difference between them. Uninteresting enemies and dungeons that are not randomly generated. There are some basic environmental puzzles, but they are not "saving point" for the gameplay.

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Story:

Nothing interesting. We must defeat 4 guardians that wait in dungeons, to reach the final boss and save the world. There are some not really interesting fetch quests on top of that.

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Gameplay:

💸 Microtranzactions	None	🏆 Achievements	Most are earned through progression, but some require brainless grind for enemies or money.
📊 Performance	No issues	💾 Save system	Automatic check point. Death in the dungeon sends us back to the city.

🦚 Game customization options	Basic graphic and sound options.
🌍 Map	There is no mini map in the overworld which makes navigation annoying. There is no shortcut for the map in the menu. The menu is brought up with space, and we need to navigate to the map. Map also doesn't remember last position and starts maximally zoomed out, which is annoying. All in all, not the best experience.
🎮 Controls	WSAD for walking, shift for dash and mouse for aiming the weapon. They are responsive but item selection could be done on a selection wheel instead of mouse scroll / numerical assignment. Menu navigation is bad. It's not intuitive, e.g. pressing ESC generally does not close the menu. It pops up leave-game-screen which pauses the game for everyone. At the same time, sometimes we need to use ESC to exit some specific menu, there is no stability here. Playing with K+M gives controller button prompts. Some menu options are weirdly hidden, and I learned items can be dropped for someone else by accident. It's not possible to re-bind controls which is annoying.
📇 Inventory	Inventory itself is not bad, as icons are clear and it's well organized. Inventory navigation is a different matter. Trying to use the mouse to select items makes the character attack in the background, as clicks are not contained in the menu. Same for trying to navigate menu with WSAD - it makes our character walk around. First time I see devs did not prevent character to respond to key input while in the inventory / game menu. It's like I would bring up a menu in Witcher to change weapon, and Geralt would keep walking around and swing sword as I click around the menu. It is also not explained well how to use the inventory, how to assign items to quick slots, how to change spells etc.
🏹 Weapons	The only useful weapon is the sword. There is no weapon progression, we use the same sword model for the whole game. We can only upgrade it's stats (damage, cric chance, speed etc.) at smith in the city. In theory there are other weapons like magic wand or bow, but they are slow and projectile-limited. Don't remember another game with such limited options. Even Cat Quest had few sword models that had better stats than our previous gear.
🕵️‍♀️ Abilities	There are few in-game classes which feels entirely pointless as the only way to play the game is to buff sword damage and health, as other weapons are so limited in use. Classes give some passive bonuses to damage or critical chance. Plus can have different dash animation. And that would be it. Just like with weapons, it's extremely limited. Say there is a druid class that can be unlocked near the end of the game, and it can't do anything useful. Or ranger has so limited amount of arrows (and they are hard to find) it's always way faster to just kill enemy with default sword than to use class abilities or weapons.
🤖 Companion and enemy AI	Enemies have a basic attack pattern. They don't show any complex behavior, try to flank us or to cooperate etc. Just charge at us if we're within their range.
🥊 Combat	Because classes are so limited and not really gameplay changing, and weapons are so meh the whole combat is average. Just go to the enemy and spam LMB to kill it. There are only 2 or 3 enemy types that require more strategy but mostly because they are immune to hits from a specific angle.

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Technicalities:

Graphic - ⭐️⭐☆ - It is a nice pixel graphic, but nothing amazing or charming
Music - ⭐️⭐☆ - There is no voice over. Basic environmental and combat sounds
Bugs - ⭐️⭐⭐ - I didn't encourage any

I removed the bar for “Never Played” this month, as I at least started all games in my library. This update is really late though, so by the time it’s posted I have basically beaten my backlog. But it will be in the October update. I made my first post in October 2016, so took me only 6 years. And I rarely add games to my account for like 2 years now.

Makes people who say they will surely play hundreds of their SG wins “later” silly, as “they don’t have time / powerful PC / (put any other excuse here), and for now just farm cards”. Sure. Thing with time is that it only goes forward, never gives us a break. If we don’t do something now we will never do it. As next week / month / year we will have other problems / tasks / responsibilities. Remember when my cousin was downloading piles of movies and burning them on CDs “for later to watch”. Unsuprisingly he never watched those drawers filled with movies. He went to UK where he settled and have kids. And all his CDs went bad after years and had to be thrown to the bin. Yay.