Rogue Empire: Dungeon Crawler RPG

I'm kinda on the fence about this one, but Steam only lets me up or down thumb, so I'll rate it a recommend because I got it for $2, and at over 6 hours invested that's my money's worth. As far as the traditional roguelike genre goes, I found Rogue Empire trivial. Without even using any "Soul Essence" perks, I beat the the first "Dungeon of Fate" with a human Warrior on the first try, started the main "shadow" campaign with a troll Mage and found it was leaning just as easy. Throughout, Rogue Empire acted like, if you know to rest to restore your hit points fully between engagements and drag groups of enemies into hallways where they can only engage you one at a time, you're an absolute master of the traditional roguelike genre and should be rewarded with victory every time. To be fair, I didn't try the, "challenge dungeon" mode, and maybe higher difficulty versions are a bit closer to the, "Hard as nails" difficulty the genre is more popularly known for. But maybe you're tired of cheap deaths. Maybe you just want to win and not scratch your head if your latest death was due to RNG or you overlooking your options. Along those lines, Rogue Empire will deliver.

An ok roguelike. Pretty straightforward and is fine enough on sale. I got it for $3 and had a decent time. Good for a change of pace if you get a bit tired of the classic favorites.

Just boring. There's very little enemy variety and the later dungeons are just mashing through giant rooms and corridors absolutely filled with the same 10 enemies. On enemy spellcaster turns they have a little missile shooting animation that takes like a quarter of a second, which turns into a huge pain in the ass when you're fighting through a room with 10 of them that shoot every turn. Despite that there was pretty much no chance of dying as long as I didn't just sit there.

Incredibly boring.

Hmmm. I think I am going to be damning this game with faint praise! Just beat the Eghoss (prologue) campaign (which is a 20 level deep dungeon crawl) on Normal/Iron Man on my first go. Even got second highest recent score on leaderboard! Usually in a roguelike I die a zillion deaths before getting some kind of win! So I am borderline on this roguelike. It seems very simplistic and easy relative to many others, kind of like a weaker version of ToME or maybe Dungeonmans crossed with a diluted DCSS. The gameplay as warrior consisted mainly of pulling enemies into corridors and chopping them into kibble with few moments of tactical variation and very few moments I felt even mildly threatened. I regularly used my consumables even, mainly to try and cut down encumbrance(!) but didn't feel the need to do it to enhance my survivability much. I ended the game never having used more than the smallest healing potion and I had dozens of each kind of healing potion in my inventory 'just in case'. So I am not sure if I will try the main campaign or not, as I have a lot of other, probably better roguelikes to try out... But it was an ok time killer for the price. I borderline recommend, particularly if you looking for a more casual or beginner roguelike. If I do try the main campaign and change my opinion, I may revise this review.

[h1][b]6/10[/b][/h1] Reminds me a little of some other Roguelikes, but slightly better. Some other Roguelikes feel punitive & unnecessarily unfriendly to new players, while this one is a little more plain *fun*... though apparently it can be quite challenging if you'd like it to be. It does have significant autoexplore issues, item/enemy visibility issues, and unnecessary complexity that hold it back from a higher score. Rogue Fable 3 is much better in almost every category. It'll be tough for another Roguelike to ever dethrone RF3. Maybe possibly RF4 will. [h2]Pros:[/h2] - Good music - Can zoom in/out a *massive* amount - Tons of difficulty and game/campaign options, including no permadeath - You can actually change movement/autoexplore speed. This is *huge* for me as I hate when it's so fast my character is effectively teleporting & I don't know how they got there - Lots of character stats, equipment slots, etc. There's a lot of depth, but it's not overwhelming - Nice color palette. Not boring or murky like many games - I love the glowing effects you see with some spell effects, leveling up, portals and whatnot - Really cool levelup sequence. You also get "cards" which are semi-random skills, usually passives but not always - Has a combat log, which is fantastic for knowing what's going on and for learning the game [h2]Mehs:[/h2] - Characters extremely ugly with massively huge heads. I wish there were more character appearance options since you're staring at them for countless hours - Good enemy variety, but it feels bizarre. Why on earth are all these different things working together in the same room/level? Rogue Fable 3 does this much better with 4 levels at a time with a theme of enemies [h2]Cons:[/h2] - Biggest one: it's often very difficult to see items on the ground. Sometimes it's because the height of the tile in front of it blocks your view of it, sometimes it's because background items like rocks look like items, and sometimes it's because it's a similar color as the background. Autoexplore does take you to items on the ground, but only once so if you're not paying enough attention, you could miss stuff. At least gold is automatically looted - Similarly, sometimes enemies are hard to see because they blend in and/or are partly shadowed due to partial vision (though your character knows they're there) - Autoexplore takes you to the previous exit when a level is cleared. Rather annoying when you want to go forward, not back... which is almost all the time - If going back to a previous level, autoexplore takes you to every little thing you had to drop because you couldn't carry it or because it wasn't worth enough to pick up. Very annoying - Autoexplore stops for barrels, which never seem to have anything useful in them - Can't stop autoexplore once it's going - Too difficult to learn new spells early on - Tons and *tons* of unnecessary items and spells. Rogue Fable 3 is much better at this with fewer but more versatile spells and with fewer garbage items - Locked door mechanics are unnecessary. Why does the Unlock spell take health from the caster?? Why so many keys? Why does kicking a door do more damage vs literally breaking my leg when exploring on the world map? None of it makes sense and none of it adds to the enjoyment of the game - Energy system isn't explained and is altogether unnecessary - Druids can't use any ranged weapons at all? Not even a staff? I don't remember it warning me of that. Lame - All pets kinda suck. Either they don't follow you or you have to keep casting something to teleport them, and/or they're quite weak. Also, Druids likely won't be learning any summon for a long time, and Mages not for a very long time - Dev seems so concerned with "balance" that it makes the game less fun for most classes. It's unfortunate - Boss fights aren't terribly fun

this is a rogue game that tries to be as fair as possible (instead of assuming that you will play 500 hours to learn its most obscure secrets and will eventually make a perfect run in order to beat it) it is very class based, in the sense that the most important decission is your class from where your skills and most of your stats derive, the base game offers assassin, ranger, druid and mage. it makes the game quite replayable because playing as a mage is totally different in terms of strategy and feeling that playing a ranger or a druid. the good thing is that if you are careful and you chose the skills accordingly when you level up the game is doable (at least for easy and normal, i have not played in hard mode) there is a bit of meta progression in the sense that once you complete the game or you die you acumulate a currency that unblocks small improvements, nothing game-breaking but makes your chars better as you make a few runs the graphics are crispy and the ui is good enough (easily accessible quick keys and no weird shortcut keys to do basic things, almost all the usual things can be done easily with the keyboard or keyboard and mouse)

i cant really give it a proper try due to gui being soo bad, sorry

This game could be a nice game, but there are too many QoL and/or polish missing, stuff that's a give in other similar games, and for this reason I don't feel like recommending it. If there was a "neutral" vote, I would rather give that, but since there isn't... So, these are the things that are irking me the most currently (after roughly 1 hour of play): 1) As a ranger, I hit the key to throw my arrow and point to an enemy, shoot my arrow. In other similar games, your last living target gets saved so that next time you attempt to shoot an arrow, the cursor jump immediately on top of them. In this game, my cursor goes to a random crate nearby, often wasting me a turn and an arrow, awful for a game where a 1-turn mistake could cost your run, and this feels like the game tripping you up on purpose. 2) The whole rendering system. If you don't have the zoom at just that one precise zoom level, then every movement generate a lot of vertical or horizontal bands on the background sprite, as the rendering tries to match the sprites to the screen pixels. It's visually awful and just plain uncomfortable to see, I can't even describe properly how much this is bothering me. 3) No slider for the Font size. The font is so ridiculously big is making reading everything slower than it should be. And this goes also for the UI (especially the log tab), it's cluttering the whole thing. There is absolutely no need for a hotkey bar that takes the whole bottom part of the screen, it's simply too big - and if it was made smaller, the log tab could coexist at the bottom of the screen with it (as most game do) eliminating most of this cluttered feeling. This is a clear hint the game was developed to be played on a tablet or small screen device, and ported to PC without properly adapting things to a PC screen size. Expect everything to look HUGE, you can probably tell already by the screenshots, if you just open them fullscreen. 4) Sometimes you want to use the mouse pointer to hover on a "buff" on the top left and read the description, but then you want to keep playing with your numpad and would like the mouse pointer to disappear as soon as you touch a numpad key, and in many roguelikes it works like that, I was playing Dungeonmans just today and it was that way. In here, you either hide the mouse pointer and can't easily check the buffs, or you don't and you move the pointer out of the way manually every single time =_= 5) There is a "Button Cursor" option you can enable that shows a cursors you can drive with the directional keys to navigate menus without the need of a mouse. Even with the "Button Cursor" enabled and visible, the way it works is clunky and counter-intuitive. Intuitively (and in most games similar to this) you would use your numpad to move around in menus like the inventory etc..., but in this game, in any of those instances you need to take your hands off the numpad and move to the arrow keys in order to operate this cursor. Man... just... why?! x_x I've played only 1 hour so far so I'm sure had I played more, I would have found yet more things. The leveling up system with RNG cards felt very fun for a roguelike, but all the things mentioned above are downgrading this game from "Enjoyable" to just "Playable", at least for me. This stuff hasn't been rectified so far in 5 years the game was out, so I don't really expect anything changing at this point and this means I can't fully recommend it to you people. I have hundreds of hours in games like Tome, Rogue's Tale, SoTS: The Pit, Dungeonmans etc... I'm sure many people can overlook those things mentioned above, but for me personally, on this one I had to ask for a refund because I couldn't stand those problems.

this is good and complete but it have slight QOL issue sometime frame drop (probaly due to too much AI action round) and super occasional serious bug, still I managed to hit the ending