Brilliant genealogical platformer Rogue Legacy launches on Switch next month
It's all relative.
Cellar Door Games has announced Rogue Legacy, its superb genealogical rogue-lite platformer, launches on Switch on 6th November.
Rogue Legacy originally released back in 2013, meaning this is another case of an oldie-but-goodie coming to Nintendo's console. And Rogue Legacy really is a good 'un, offering a rogue-inspired jaunt through a deadly, ever-changing castle.
On a fundamental level, Rogue Legacy is a pretty traditional (and wonderfully chunky) exploration-based 2D platformer - albeit one draped around a rogue-lite framework. As such, you've a single life in which to investigate the castle - whose layout changes with every new run-through - and stave off its inhabitants long enough to defeat each boss and win the game.
Die, however, and your hero is consigned to history; when this happens, you're able to pick from a fresh selection of hero classes - all a little bit further along your hereditary line, and each with their own unique genetic traits (randomly selected from a possible 37) that positively or negatively affect your next play-through.
Heroes that suffer from "vertigo", for instance, are forced to play through a vertically mirrored castle, while heroes with "dementia" hear spooky voices and encounter enemies that aren't really there. Heroes with "dwarfism", meanwhile, are very small - enabling them to access secret areas but reducing their swing distance - while "far-sighted" characters find their immediate surroundings unhelpfully blurred.
Luckily, helping temper frustration, any gold found in the castle can be spent prior to each new attempt in order to bolster your current and future hero's armour, weapons and abilities. It all adds up to a fiendishly more-ish adventure, whose natural focus on short, digestible run-throughs is particularly suited to portable play.
When Rogue Legacy launches on the Switch eShop on 6th November, it'll cost £10.99.