*This article is compiled from IGN US and is not reproduced without authorization.
In 2013, the original Rogue Legacy was officially released, bringing a revolutionary change to the standard roguelike game goal: after death, players will no longer lose all items as before, but can choose to pay the currency for permanent upgrades, thus slightly reducing the difficulty of subsequent games. This setting opened up a whole new sub-genre of games, roguelites, which are now part of many great titles such as Hades, Death Return, and Dead Cell. Today, nine years later, the game industry is highly competitive, but as a sequel, Rogue Legacy 2 cleverly did not completely copy the setting of the previous game, but successfully created a modern style, setting and game mechanics. In order to meet the increasingly high requirements of today's players for such games, and to polish their own design to the extreme.
Thief Legacy 2 is like a redesign of the original Legacy of Thieves with more development time and budget, while knowing exactly how the roguelite genre has evolved since 2009. The basic design of this game is just as exciting as the previous game: in the game, player names, classes, and characteristics are randomly generated; to explore the huge procedurally generated castles; players need to constantly collect loot to defeat the final boss. After the character dies, all progress in the player's level will be reset (except for bosses that have been defeated and unenlocked teleportation points). However, players can use the loot they collect to perform permanent upgrades, which will gradually increase, and the "descendants" of the rebirth can also inherit these upgrades.
Thief Legacy 2 improves on top of this basic setting. For example, each class has its own unique weapons, talents, passive skills, and even the data is counted separately by class, which makes the gameplay between different classes very different from the beginning. For example, my favorite class Valkyrie, which is a very comprehensive class, comes with a huge long-handled weapon that can be swung in four directions, and is somewhat similar to the style of The Hollow Knight, her special talent is to rotate weapons and fire small cannonballs, and her mana can be restored for each projectile fired. The Barbarian, on the other hand, uses a powerful axe, and although he moves slowly and can only attack enemies on the left and right sides on the ground, he can always rotate the attack while in the air, causing huge amounts of damage in the hands of the old player.
There are a total of 13 classes in the game, and if you are skilled in using the weapons of each class, you can also deal fatal damage to your enemies. Similar to the concept of skill critical strikes, some classes can deal this damage by simply sprinting towards an enemy, but for a small number of classes, the trigger conditions are more demanding, such as landing with the tip of a sword, triggering the third stage of a three-stage slash, or attacking after dodging and rolling. This design not only allows different classes to be further differentiated, but also gives players who work various classes a sense of reward.
Whenever a new level begins, I need to choose from three classes that appear randomly, and whenever the Valkyrie appears, I will not hesitate to choose her, but I am also very happy to try those classes that I am not familiar with. Each class has its own strengths and weaknesses, so I can try to play to their respective strengths and avoid their weaknesses, which is also the fun of the game.
The game's diversity goes far beyond that, as it's not just classes that appear randomly on the characters: each character comes with its own random traits, some of which enhance the character, while others have negative effects. And the effect of the feature is also very logical, if your character has a "color blind" feature, then your game screen will become only black and white; if your character is very vulnerable to being frightened, your game screen will darken every time it is attacked; characters with "vegetarian" characteristics cannot be recovered by eating, but will be hurt. These settings are exactly the same as in the original Thief Legacy, but the game also adds a lot of interesting new features, some of which may even make you laugh, or at least make you laugh.
When you first see these features, you may indeed think that they bring a more interesting and diverse experience to the game, although some of the features may be buried deeper, but in the end you will find that these laughs will become less funny. For example, I think one of the most obvious characteristics is "pacifism", which makes all attack skills disappear, and the advantage is that it can increase the number of gold coins obtained, but it also makes the process of obtaining gold coins very painful, and I think the increase of gold coins does not offset the difficulty it brings to me. Fortunately, I had three random classes and features to choose from every time I restarted the level, and I found that I had barely chosen the ones that made the game experience worse.
Returned with a full load
The rich class system is great, but what makes this game feel richer and bolder than its predecessors is that the game world has become huge and diverse, and it is closely related. The 6 areas in Legacy of Thieves 2 are very unique, while the 4 areas in the original Legacy of Thieves are very similar. In addition to the difference between the enemy and the background of the picture, the layout of each area is actually not much different. The various regions of Legacy of Thieves 2 will present players with different challenges. There is a large horizontal scene where players need to cross islands to fight, constantly dodging the scattered bow and arrow traps while also fighting the enemy in a narrow area; the other scene is the complete opposite, requiring the player to climb up on an extremely sophisticated platform. There is also a maze-like scene with very low visibility, players can only rely on various road signs to find directions, the fun of this area is that players need to constantly explore to find the location of the boss.
Powerful bosses are a stumbling block in the player's path, and the new Heirloom level is one of the elements of the game that can't be ignored, a special artificial item that allows the character to gain new abilities for exploration and combat, such as double jumps, aerial dashes, and bouncing special shells or damage. A tutorial will appear before each heirloom to make sure that players understand what abilities they are about to acquire, are not too surprised by the clever traps, and can use them smoothly. And getting the heirloom itself is very exciting, not only because it almost appears with the unlocking of new parts of the map, but also because the new abilities that the heirloom brings allow me to dodge attacks from specific enemies. Whether it's sprinting through empty energy, bouncing power, or a two-stage sprint to escape trouble, these additional movement abilities that heirloom brings greatly enhance the character's defenses, greatly extending the time of each life.
In the extremely dangerous levels of Legacy of Thieves 2, there is a lot of very interesting content in addition to heirlooms. There are also a large number of "relics" that need to be explored to discover, which can bring the player a very strong buff effect, or provide high-risk changes, sometimes even both of which appear at the same time, but there is a value called "decomposition" in the game, which will detect the number of relics carried by the character, and if you carry too much at once, the maximum health of the character will be reduced. In addition, in addition to the weapons that each class brings, players can also pick up other weapons and spells, which can also be purchased in the subsequent game process, and runes can also be traded, and after equipping runes, the character's ability will be increased, allowing for a deeper level of gameplay. For example, add health to attacks to steal effects, extra jumps or dashes, or increase the damage caused by fatal hits, etc.
All of this can be combined into the biggest highlight of this game: every game has meaning. And that's the biggest reason I love this game. Even if I didn't beat the boss, didn't unlock the heirloom, didn't find shortcuts, and didn't even make any significant progress. But as soon as I find a new way to advance, try a new class, learn the effects of a new feature, find a new core fragment, or just learn how to fight against an enemy or trap, I will be rewarded. Even if I didn't even do that, even though my journey was super short, it at least meant that I didn't put much experience into the game, which is what the game is all about.
The more courageous the Vietnam War
In Legacy of Thieves 2, there are a lot of situations where players can make the choice to improve their character. Unfortunately, players are highly likely to make the wrong choice, especially if they have to pay for coins to upgrade and unlock, or whether to save in a not-so-good location. Part of the reason is that after 15 upgrades, the amount of gold required for each subsequent upgrade increases. It wasn't a big deal at first, but at level 50 or so you'll find the cost increasingly unaffordable.
Because I made the wrong decision to use all the points to upgrade the family manor in order to see the full upgrade effect, it was difficult for me to advance in the end. The advantage of this is that I have unlocked and experienced many different classes, while the disadvantage is that the data for all classes is generally low, so that it is difficult for me to pass the difficulties in the subsequent areas, especially because I want to collect enough loot to be able to level up several levels at a time, but I usually don't live that long. Therefore, I can only grind the blood hard. In my week, I can almost say that I climbed through the last two levels step by step, and in the first half of the game, I was still happy to be able to make progress, and later on my progress was as slow as a hanging bottle, which was extremely painful. It was all my own problem, but I really wanted a wash-point option to appear in the game so that I could jump out of this abyss of struggle. This may be good news for you readers, and you must not repeat my mistakes.
Thief Legacy 2 also brings a very nice new setting - "internal rules". It actually contains a series of options for players to adjust various values and settings, so that they can determine the difficulty of the game according to their own preferences. To reduce the difficulty, you can set the amount of damage or health inflicted by enemies, and to increase the difficulty, you can increase these values. You can even make a series of settings to improve the operability of the game, such as turning on Infinite Flight, turning off Enemy Contact Damage, turning on "Aiming Time Slower", and so on. Personally, I haven't touched on these settings, everything is playing according to the initial settings, but I think these options provided by Celllar Door Games are very good, because in addition to the simple, normal, hardmode of the game itself, these settings can be additionally adjusted to the difficulty and operability of the game, so that every player can experience according to their own needs.
You know, the game clearance is actually just the beginning of the game "Legacy of Thieves 2" (I spent a total of about 16 hours in a week to complete the level), and the content after the level is much richer. After defeating the final boss, you'll encounter a new NPC who will show you a list of multipliers called "Burdens", which you can make to make these adjustments to the game when you start from scratch, such as increasing the damage dealt by enemies, adding some more powerful enemy class, or adding a new version of an existing boss battle. Each new weekly heading requires two new burdens, so two need to be selected for the two-week program, four burdens need to be selected for the three-week program, and so on. This setting is very clever, not only to keep the challenges in the game new, but also to allow players to control the level of difficulty they hope to face in subsequent games.
summary
Legacy of Thieves 2 is a transformative sequel that remakes the original Legacy of Thieves that exploded in 2013 into a modern roguelite game that is almost one of the best in the category. While players may be overwhelmed by the large number of options for upgrading, especially since there is no way to redeem the wrong option in the game, this problem is really trivial. Because there are a large number of freely selectable settings in the game, as well as six completely different areas, can bring their own unique challenges, not to mention the proficiency can greatly enhance the battle experience. At the same time, the game is also very rich in content after completing the level, so that players want to continue to experience new challenges. Today, Cellar Door Games' achievement is not only the launch of the first roguelite game, their Rogue Legacy 2 is one of the best roguelite games of all time.
merit
Excellent career setting
Rich area design
Satisfying combat system
shortcoming
Players may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available after the upgrade