Bland, Generic and Soul-Crushingly Empty
Underwhelming is the word that comes to mind when I think of Rogue Explorer. It manages to be a masterclass in mediocrity which only devolves into frustration as its levels get longer and more difficult.
A Lifeless Setting
There is no story at all in this game. Rogue Explorer doesn’t give a Mega Man opening cutscene or even a simple text crawl to explain anything. Not that you need any explanation, because the concept is extremely simple: You play as a nameless, fully customizable adventurer, and you go into dungeons to kill stuff, nothing more, nothing less. I wouldn’t mind this if anything else was going for it, but the game doesn’t deliver anywhere. The world is fantasy at its most generic. With areas literally called “forest” and “rocky place,” you know you’re in for a forgettable ride. There are no unique locations, enemy designs, or anything really, so the roguelike metroidvania (two words I’m sure you’re sick of hearing by now) gameplay suffers, even when it barely qualifies as the latter.
Hit things and pray
The “levels” see you going through randomly generated areas and looking for the exit. Your character equips two weapons, all standard affair sword and sorcery stuff, which float next to them. What starts as a nice little idea of one active and one passive attack soon makes you realize that if they were to put weapons in the character’s hands. They wouldn’t be able to hit anything, so they took the easy way out. This mentality extends to the nonexistent-level design.
To compare, Dead Cells does this really cool thing where the level layout is always different, but the level design is the same. As you go through the prisoners’ quarters time and time again, you start getting through it quickly because you know what each route leads to, what certain landmarks mean, and you start to have a plan for the wider run. Rogue Explorer does none of this.
Every level is an uninterpretable labyrinth where you follow an arrow that leads you to the end and hope you don’t go insane by floor 3 of 8. There’s a minimap in the top right corner but no way to access a full map of any kind, making the minimap redundant. Nothing changes from the beginning to the end. No new enemies, environmental details, or anything whatsoever, but there is a day-night cycle for some reason.
There are maybe 6 enemy types in the entire game, ranging from unpredictable, teleporting wizards to spear-wielding lizards that trap you on ledges while your secondary weapon chips away at them at a snail’s pace. However, most enemies you’ll face are melee guys of all shapes and sizes that slide forward with a downward smash of their sword, club, axe, etc. They all function identically, but some do 200 damage, and others do 600. That’s another issue with the game. The enemies are ridiculously powerful. Even on the first level, enemies will kill you in around 3 or 4 hits. This number goes down as the game progresses. Here’s why.
Upgrades and other useless features
Rogue Explorer has a basic crafting and upgrading system alongside a generic skill tree for permanent upgrades. Most of this is entirely pointless. There is no sense of satisfaction in achieving anything in the game. You get tons of materials, and you’re overloaded with weapons, armor, and accessories, but you come to realize that very little of what you get is actually useful. A “merge” system adds a modifier to equipment by merging two of the same piece of equipment.
The modifiers are unbelievably boring. How about +2% attack, or better yet, +1% map discovery. I’m brimming with excitement. The problem is that you have to do this for everything, so when you get a better weapon, you have to go through the same process of merging, upgrading, and crafting more to do it all again for a marginal improvement. The permanent character upgrades are just as dull. “oh wow, 10 extra hp? Just what I wanted to add to my 700!” Or how about the addition of “minor health recovery” to the level-up upgrade pool? Nothing is even remotely as fun to unlock as the simplest upgrade in Hades, for example.
It’s not only that. Rogue Explorer also gives you two of the least useful mechanics I’ve ever seen in a video game. There’s the classic Mario stomp attack, which sounds fun on the surface until you realize that almost every enemy can attack upwards. The second mechanic is the dodge roll. You know how Symphony of the Night had the rapid, fluid back-dash over 20 years ago? Well, imagine that, but it goes on for about two seconds too long, and it’s painfully slow. That’s the dodge roll in this game. But I’m not done yet. Last but by no means least, there’s the actual level-ups.
It gets worse
Most level-ups you get throughout each run are completely worthless. Obviously, you get simple additions like attack up or movement speed up, but most upgrades are even more obsolete than the other ones. How about multi-hit attacks? That sounds useful, doesn’t it? Got you again! it does nothing. I have tested it several times, and it honestly is completely useless.
Then there are the upgrades to roll distance and the shockwave. The shockwave does around 20 damage to enemies when you land. It does no knockback, and the damage is negligible when enemies typically have hundreds if not thousands of hp. But surely something has to be decent. How about The Perfectionist perk that increases damage when your health is full? Nope. There isn’t a reliable healing method in the game. So, if you get hit, unless you’re lucky and find a potion in a treasure chest, your only hope is getting some healing from level-ups, which isn’t great anyway.
Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum. Level up perks that are so good that you might as well quit your run if you don’t get them. There’s “Increase equipped weapons,” which gives you an extra attack for both your main and sub-weapon, “Guts”, which lets you survive any attack with 1hp, and “recover health at the end of the stage,” which does just that. The later levels become impossible without these with the raw damage enemies end up doing with their massive health bars.
And it’s a pain to navigate too
Nothing works the way you want it to. I’ve already mentioned the lack of a full map, but there’s more. There’s a list of perks on the pause menu, but unlike, say, Hades, where you can see what each one does and how great the effect is, Rogue Explorer gives you a list of icons that you can barely see tucked away at the far side of the screen.
The rest of the UI doesn’t fare much better. There’s this stickiness for lack of a better term when pressing buttons. Every time you pause, select something or shift between menus, it feels like you’re trudging through tar, and it just makes the mess of mechanics that bit more irritating.
I’ve touched on movement, but even the simple act of moving around the different levels gets boring. To touch on others in its genre again, movement plays a large part in the enjoyment of exploring in a metroidvania. Having a super dash or wolf transformation gives a new, satisfying way to move around as a reward for sticking with it. Rogue Explorer once again has nothing. When you don’t have more options, the longer levels become even worse slogs than they already were.
The Wider Problem
I’m sure you’ve noticed, but I have been comparing Rogue Explorer to other games quite a lot throughout this review. I’ve chosen to do that because that’s the standard the game has to hold up to when being put on a console like the Switch. It’s very clearly a port of a mobile game, with the UI, general bite-sized structure of the game, and the sluggishness feeling designed for quick bursts on a phone.
With this in mind, the question falls to this. Why would you ever get a £7 mobile game when you can wait for a sale and pick up Dead Cells, a game that executes the roguelike metroidvania concept with so much more finesse for around the same price? If not Dead Cells, then how about the countless other fantastic Indie games on Switch? There’s just no reason to pick Rogue Explorer up. Even as a budget title, it’s hardly the cheapest game you can get on Switch for the quality of the product.
Conclusion
Rogue Explorer is as bland as it is uninspired. It’s a meandering slog through level after level after boring, aimless level. It’s unpolished, irritating, and whatever other negative adjectives come to mind. However, I did like the little dance the character sometimes does, so it gets at least one point for that.
Presentation – 40%
Gameplay – 20%
Controls – 5%
Value for money – 20%
Overall: 21%
This article was originally published on September 3, 2021
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