Rogue Lords

Genre: Roguelike / Turn-Based RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

Rogue Lords is a Roguelike and Turn-Based RPG released in 2021 on PC and then in 2022 ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of The Devil, aiming to return from hell after having been beaten back by demon hunters years prior to the start of the game. To do so, you’ll send out a trio of minions such as Dracula and The Headless Horseman to act in your stead, killing demon hunters, gathering magical relics, and just generally spreading fear and chaos in the human world.

The presentation in this game is superb, with decent 3D characters on the game’s map screen, and detailed 2D backgrounds and extremely fluidly-animating 2D characters in combat, to the point where it was actually difficult to tell if these characters were 2D or 3D. The character design is great as well, and these are further given life with some good voice acting that further distinguishes the game’s characters, all backed by a soundtrack that does a great job emphasizing this game’s themes of horror monsters terrorizing mankind.

While the core presentation here is good, the performance absolutely is not. This game’s framerates regularly chug in ugly ways, and it can even get so bad that the game seems to freeze for a second before starting back up again. What’s more, when first starting the game, I found myself with an odd error where the game would freeze and crash when played in handheld mode or docked to a TV with a third-party dock (I was using the Genki Covert Dock Mini) – for some reason, it would only play when docked using Nintendo’s first-party dock, an issue I have never seen with any other game.

Getting past this game’s performance problems, the gameplay itself has players taking their team of three characters through a typical Roguelike tree full of various encounters, similar to Slay the Spire, with the paths strewn with battles, story events, healing fountains, shops (the Grim Reaper, trading for your culled souls in exchange for abilities, upgrades, and relics to power your team), and sacrificial alters where you permanently sacrifice abilities your minions aren’t using to get new abilities and increase their potential.

Unlike Slay the Spire, this is more of a typical Turn-Based RPG, with no random cards or anything like that – each monster in your team has their own unique abilities that can be utilized by using up your party’s shared ability points, meaning that you can spread the use of abilities among all three, or just have one character hog up the entire turn. One limiting factor is that abilities are greyed out after use, needing the use of another ability to recharge and reset used moves, something that can be frustrating when you feel like now would be the perfect time to make use of a killer move, but you already used it up the previous turn.

As in Slay the Spire, enemies forecast their moves ahead of time, giving you the ability to respond accordingly, perhaps by killing off an enemy readying a nasty attack, beefing up the defenses of a weakened party member who is being targeted, or if you’re in particular dire straits, going into the game’s last-ditch resort, Devil Mode, but more on that later.

Both your minions and your enemies have both physical and spiritual health, meaning that you can opt to target one if the other is too well-defended, and likewise must keep track of both types of health in your own party. Building up physical defenses and physical healing only works great until you encounter opponents who fight with attacks that exclusively damage spiritual health.

Another element to the strategy here is that lowering either health bar won’t finish off a character – they need to have one of their two bars dropped to zero and then deliver a coup de grace to finish the job, leading to moves like Dracula’s ability to sacrifice all of his health to increase his power. Enemies dealt an additional hit when at zero health will finish that enemy off. Your minions, on the other hand, don’t go down as easily – after reaching zero health, any further damage they take is deducted from your health, and it is not until your health reaches zero that you fail the current run.

Outside of battle itself, your characters also participate in story segments where you must choose how to approach various situations, like whether to kill a blacksmith helping the enemy or charm him to help your forces. You’ll be selecting among your party members to carry out these interactions, with their individual stats determining their rate of success. That is, unless you decide to put a finger on the scales.

Being the devil, you’re not beholden to play by the rules. At any time during the game, you can activate Devil Mode, which allows you to trade your life points for various effects in the world. Want to ensure that story interaction succeeds? Add a portal to the map so your party can ignore the established paths? Or fiddle with the health and status effects of your party and the enemies’, setting their life points to zero, taking their stat buffs for your own party, or pushing a debuff off of your character and onto one of the enemies. This feature is a fun addition that lets you fudge small details and take a more direct role in close fights, as long as you’re willing to pay for it.

Overall, I think there are a lot of creative gameplay mechanics at work here, though I think some work better than others. Having to always re-activate abilities after using them is a drag, and I feel like your options for upgrading your characters feels too slow-paced and clunky. I also wish there were more “Roguelite” elements to power up your characters between runs.

However, among all of my complaints about Rogue Lords, I still have to say it’s the nasty performance issues that really harm it the most on Nintendo Switch. Yeah, the sluggush pacing and tedious combat elements don’t help, but the way this game constantly seems like it’s struggling to play acts as a drag on the entire game. It’s a shame too, because Rogue Lords does indeed have some really great things going for it, like some great character art and the really creative Devil Mode. Elements like these may still draw in fans of RPGs and Roguelikes, but if so, I recommend you get this game on another platform due to all the issues the Nintendo Switch version has.

tl;dr – Rogue Lords is a Roguelike and Turn-Based RPG where players take the role of The Devil, sending out minions to spread fear and chaos in the human world. This game has some really clever mechanics and some outstanding character art, but slow pacing and some absolutely horrible performance issues mean that this game falls short of what it could have been, and even as-is this is a game that’s better on other platforms.

Grade: C+

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