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" Release Date: June 27 Platforms available on: PC Developer: Cellar Door Games Publisher: Cellar Door Games Genre: Action platforming roguelike A young knight, sword held gleefully aloft in front of him, enters a foreboding castle intent on avenging the deaths of his ancestors. He slashes through animated skeletons, floating eyeballs and harmless chandeliers for a few rooms, before an evil painting suddenly pops off the wall, and devours him whole. Game over. This is Rogue Legacy, a game paying homage to the &amp;#039;roguelike&amp;#039; dungeon crawling genre with a more hereditary focus. Unlike other games that fall under the &amp;#039;rogue&amp;#039; classification, Rogue Legacy eschews the overhead dungeon perspective for a side-scrolling view that gives a feeling more reminiscent of Ghouls &amp;#039;n Ghosts or the early Castlevania games.  The shift in perspective may give a more accessible appearance, but it can&amp;#039;t hide the punishing difficulty that has long been the root of the genre.  Players will die frequently and without mercy in Rogue Legacy, but the team at Cellar Door Games has found a creative way to twist the genre to turn each painful death into an exciting and fun opportunity. Whenever a hero dies, players must choose one of his or her offspring to take up the sword as the next generation&amp;#039;s hero. This is where the legacy in the game&amp;#039;s title comes from.  Rogue Legacy&amp;#039;s beauty lies in never knowing quite what to expect when your new far-sighted and flatulent hero enters the castle. Every generation you are given three new offspring to choose from, each of which has a randomized class and a small handful of randomly assigned traits. Classes are balanced well to give each a unique play style. Knights have stronger attacks while barbarians have more health and wizards have more powerful spells. Eventually more unique classes also open up, like the miner who can gather more gold and the lich whose maximum health grows with every kill.  You can later upgrade classes to make them even more distinct, like turning the knight into a paladin with a shield, or giving the miner a head lamp to highlight all treasure chests in the castle. And while picking the right class is important, it&amp;#039;s the character traits that push Rogue Legacy over the edge from being merely a fun dungeon crawler into becoming an addiction. Traits come in all varieties, and offer a range of unique effects. Some, like baldness and irritable bowel syndrome, are purely cosmetic attributes to add some extra personality to your heroes (the latter of which causes your hero to cheerfully toot their way through the castle when jumping or hit by an enemy). Others are more eccentric, like color-blindness and nostalgia, which cover the screen in black and white or sepia filters respectively.  Vertigo is particularly devious, flipping the entire screen upside down. Meanwhile dementia is a personal favorite, causing your hero to occasionally hallucinate enemies that cannot be killed but likewise cannot hurt you either. Most of the traits will have a more profound impact on your play style, though. Gigantism and dwarfism will make you bigger or smaller, impacting your sword&amp;#039;s reach and opening some secret passage ways for smaller characters. Traits can also alter how far your character is knocked back when hit by an enemy or even make your hero invulnerable to the spike traps that litter the castle. Heroes are assigned up to two traits, and you&amp;#039;ll often find yourself picking new heroes based on traits rather than classes for the unique variations they add to the typical castle exploration. The castle itself is also randomised each generation, with room layouts and enemy placements shifting for each new hero.  Early on this fact is immensely frustrating. Your early heroes will likely die only a few rooms into the castle, making it difficult to feel like any progress is being made. But you quickly learn that progress is measured in gold collected, rather than rooms explored. By amassing gold you can use your fallen hero&amp;#039;s treasure to build a castle of your own, unlocking new classes and adding permanent stat boosts to future generations. Your heroes will get stronger as your castle grows, and in turn you will be able to venture further into the perpetually shifting dungeon. A haunted forest, a trap-filled tower and a hellish underworld offer new enemies, challenges and bosses to discover, and will take many generations before you are ready to face them. The castle is also rife with secrets to uncover as you explore. Magic runes are hidden in chests unlocked by special criteria, like clearing all enemies in a room or crossing a chasm of spikes without taking damage  Blueprints can be found for new weapons and armor. Powerful mini-bosses will reward you with more treasure, and there is even a sad clown running a carnival who will let you shoot at targets to earn some extra gold. The cornerstone holding all of the random elements in check is the game&amp;#039;s focus on collecting gold rather than simply killing enemies. The gold, and the permanent upgrades it can buy, become a constant variable amid a sea of chaos. It becomes difficult to tear yourself away from Rogue Legacy, as the repetitive flow is brilliantly augmented by randomly generated traits and dungeon layouts. The quest for gold also pushes players to explore new and harder areas, as the upgrades become more expensive, requiring you to seek out stronger enemies and the rewards that come with them. The gold that acts as a balance can also become a barrier though. It is possible to reach the point of diminishing rewards, where new areas may prove to be more challenging than you can handle but the well-traveled rooms don&amp;#039;t offer enough gold to afford new upgrades. It&amp;#039;s a difficult hump to overcome if you hit it, bringing the game&amp;#039;s pace to a screeching halt until you spawn a hero with a lucky enough combination of class and traits to proceed.  There are also a few purely technical hiccups, where the game crashes without warning while trying to restart after dying. An update shortly after launch has admittedly made crashes less frequent, but has not eliminated them completely.  Rogue Legacy&amp;#039;s beauty lies in never knowing quite what to expect when your new far-sighted and flatulent hero enters the castle At first the randomness feels like it hampers discovery, since you are constantly faced with losing your progress. But before long it is clear that the game&amp;#039;s chaotic nature actually enhances the exploration, with each generation presenting an entire castle of new discoveries.      Each hero&amp;#039;s death means an opportunity to buy new castle upgrades, but in order to enter the castle upgrade screen you have to first select the next generation&amp;#039;s hero. Once the upgrades are selected, you already have a new hero so you might as well explore the newly randomised castle, and the whole cycle starts over again. It becomes difficult to tear yourself away from Rogue Legacy, as the repetitive flow is brilliantly augmented by randomly generated traits and dungeon layouts. Before you know it, three hours and 20 generations of heroes have passed, and you finally realize that your cheeks are where you feel the strain the most from smiling the entire time.   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/review/a495220/rogue-legacy-review-pc-carefully-crafted-randomness/>