Developed by Leikir Studio and Cyanide, Rogue Lords is entering a booming market, that of roguelite. However, Rogue Lords does not choose to be the hero who will save the planet, but quite the opposite. So prepare your finest offering, your finest glass of vintage blood, let’s go for Rogue Lords!
Death Van Helsing
The devil, the coolest person there is, got busted and banned by Van Hellsing, except the devil, he’s not super okay with it and he doesn’t take it well. To banish him, Van Hellsing used relics, six even. And the devil is going to use evil legends on earth to work for him, their goals? Spread evil, harvest souls and recover his relics.
For that, we will go through 6 chapters of stories with the help of teams of 3 “heroes”, we will especially direct evil legends, like the famous Dracula, the one who has trouble finding a Sleepy Hollow hat, the one whose will avoid pronouncing her name too often in front of a mirror: Bloody Mary, or even the one we prefer not to come across on the A86 in the middle of the night: the White Lady. A total of 9 legends will be playable, each of them will have its own gameplay.
Each game will consist of advancing in chapters, for that, you go like in a Slay The Spire, choose your moves intelligently, is this the time to: fight, see a merchant, perform an event, face an Elite, recover of life… ? There are elite fights imposed on your path, but overall it’s up to you to choose your moves. Sometimes secondary events can appear randomly, they can be of any type and it can definitely be a game changer.
What great ideas
Contrary to what one might think, the game is not a card deckbuilder at all, but a classic skill game. However, we have a game that is full of good ideas, besides it is almost full of good ideas, it’s so nice.
If we take the skills, we will get closer to an autobattler, if you get 3x the same skill then it will go to silver rank, then 3x in silver it will go to gold, at each rise you will be able to choose a second skill at the coincidence. There is therefore every interest in making them evolve, especially since they often become much more powerful, either they will inflict more penalties, or cost less or do more damage, it’s all good! Regarding management, you will have a number of limited slots at the start, but certain events on your way will offer you to sacrifice a skill, if you do it will never reappear until the end of the chapter, but you will have a additional skill space. A good way to manage your skills.
The events can also be a phase of dialogue with NPCs, your characters have characteristics, before the event, you will be exposed to the most efficient characteristics, in addition to discussing, you will have choices, for example, you you might be able to corrupt the soul of a priest so that he later sacrifices his parishioners, but we were going to let you discover all these rather pleasant scenes, we are bad guys! No more kindness, saving the earth, we leave that to others.
Two-step fighting and cheating
The fights are pretty well done there too, we find the principle of Slay The Spire or other, we know in advance who will attack us and which character will be attacked. As usual, you have a pool of points and attacks have a cost. The strength is that we are not sure of randomness like in a card game, we know in advance what fate we have. Once a spell is used, it cannot be used once more unless you use our hero’s unique ability which will then reset all of your abilities.
Dracula for example will reset all the abilities of all your heroes, Bloody Mary will stick a mirror on an enemy who will then suffer all the damage she would do to someone (and therefore double if she targets the person in the mirror directly ), but also to reset his own abilities.
In addition, each character in the game has 2 “life” gauges, one of HP on which damage must be done, and the other of spirit on which morale must be undermined. Your attacks do most of the damage on one of the two gauges, sometimes both. To defeat an opponent, you have to empty one of his gauges then attack one last time to defeat him. Don’t worry regarding taking some damage from your heroes, they recover all their gauges at the end of each fight, but if during a fight your gauge is empty, then your diabolical energy will take over and be reduced, it’s the Devil’s life gauge, but not only…
Because yes, one of the most beautiful assets of Rogue Lords is this diabolical energy. If it represents your general life, it also serves as a cheat gauge, almost everything is modifiable thanks to this gauge. The tutorial at the beginning of the game explains how to use it, but you will have to use it to see all that it is possible to do, in combat, you can recharge your skills, move penalties (from your heroes to enemies for example), or the opposite move a bonus (from your enemies to yourself for example), to empty a gauge, or on the contrary to increase it. But outside, it will also be able to be used to modify your probabilities of success during events. In short, cheating is good! You will also sometimes have the chance to come across places that give you a little energy, so don’t hesitate to use them!
It’s nice ?
Complicate to visually judge Rogue Lord, the drawn characters are quite divergent, clearly this type of Art Direction, we like it or hate it, rather complicate to be neutral. Here, we liked this part taken.
However, we regret the movement passages in the game, the sets are rather tasteless and redundant, not to mention the catastrophic movements of our characters. We will also be relieved by the incessant lags during these movements, it was clearly not necessary to leave the possibility of moving if it is for it to be an ordeal to do, it is not beautiful, that lag, visually, c It’s a hassle to find one’s way, frankly a false good idea.
On the sound side the game accompanies us well, it’s not a slap, but it’s not bad either, the pleasure will obviously be to play on mobile, so not necessarily with sound. We will still highlight the superb (English) narration of the game, which really increases the immersion that we have in this game. The texts are entirely in French and we did not feel any typos or inconsistencies .
We will also note the absence of touch control, always a shame for this kind of little game, but above all a little complicated ergonomics with the controller, it is not easy to know where the cursor is, or even to succeed in selecting pile what you want.
And we will end on the difficulty of the game, overall Rogue Lords is not nice like the Devil who dictates our actions to us, the difficulty is increasing, the more chapters you will finish the more the game will be difficult. But you still have the possibility to play the game in apprentice mode which gives you more basic resources (100 Diabolical Energy) and the fights are easier with less violent enemies. But as often, a defeat does not mean losing everything, because by losing or winning, you will accumulate global experience which will allow you to have new relics in your next game or even unlock new heroes.
