Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos

Can't really escape "roguelites" if you've been gaming in the past 10 years, or at least tried out a few indie games. Well this is yet another game with "rogue" in the name, it's not quite a roguelite like Binding of Isaac or Hades. Instead in this one you keep all your gains after you die, and you just become stronger and stronger as you can upgrade all your stats with the gems you picked up in dungeons. So if an area is too hard? Just play more and more and you'll eventually get to beat it. It's a similar system to what we have seen in Rogue Legacy, and that game was seriously addictive for me.

The game features a nice over the top view kinda like 2D Zelda and features pretty decent sword and shield combat. It's fun to just come in and kill everything, and then pick up whatever loot you can get. The dungeons are slightly randomized but after a few tries you'll eventually have seen all the rooms they had to offer, but at that point you are probably ready to beat its boss and move on to the next one. In between dungeons you have a world to explore with little side quests and other little things to get to, eventually unlocking the tools and gear to get to your next dungeon. The game also features fishing, farming, customizing your home but those features are perhaps a little barebones and aren't quite as exciting as they may seem on paper.

Overall I thought this was a pretty fun game, I just kept wanting to play it til I reached the ending (total playtime: 11 hours). It's not insanely challenging since you can just upgrade your stats after each attempt, so the difficulty spike quickly gets lower each time. That's perhaps the biggest draw for me, I don't always want to play a game that's hard like Dark Souls and get really frustrated, sometimes it's good to just mellow out and play a small fun title like this. I think the devs were perhaps a little too ambitious with some of the content they put it (it does get repetitive at times) but it does seem like they were really into their project and tried to put everything in. Worth giving a shot if it's already sitting in your games library, I'm glad I tried it.