Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos – Review

Team17 has been topping the charts with the multiplayer games they have been publishing the last few years. Overcooked! reigns supreme when it comes to witty and amusing party games, with their fairly new IP Moving Out just getting a big free update and an interesting piece of DLC. Now, another co-op game is released under Team17’s banner, namely Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos, which mixes traditional Zelda gameplay with a dash of city building, albeit a very limited dash in that aspect. We very much enjoyed the things that worked, but mainly in the online multiplayer aspect, this game is one of the buggiest releases we have ever seen.

Story

Rogue Heroes has a fairly basic plot where an ancient evil is threatening the peaceful lands of Tasos. There are four Titans that have been awakened from their slumber, sending their minions all over the world, wreaking havoc wherever they go. You, an unnamed hero (and many others, seeing this is a co-op game), are tasked to take on all the Titans and build up your shabby town.

While you occasionally get a little explanation of what is going on, the story is just background material, creating a reason for you to explore the world. There’s not that much lore to explore, but the cliché plot does give it a fairly authentic ‘charm’.

Graphics

Graphically the game uses very traditional pixilated sprites, very much reminiscent of the older Zelda games. You’ll have a proper variation in terms of different character models, monsters and even random NPCs. The overworld is nicely designed, with enough clutter to make it feel alive. Sadly, there are many dead ends and useless spaces, which you don’t have in the aforementioned series, where ‘useless’ space was often a way to reach another area. In Rogue Heroes, you just have a lot of wasted dead ends. The game is a proper homage to the old school games it takes inspiration of.

Sound

The sound design is fairly okay, with some upbeat music playing in the background, but when playing with friends, this will undoubtedly be overshadowed by people shouting at one another. The latter is not because of the high difficulty of the game, but when playing online, you’ll encounter more bugs and crashes than even the PlayStation 4 version of Cyberpunk 2077. This may sound ridiculous, but the number of times we had to restart the game to resync with the other players is just absurd.

Gameplay

Even though the game advertises itself as a classic adventure game with roguelite elements, the roguelite portion of the game is almost non-existent, to be honest. While, upon dying, you will have to redo the zone or dungeon you were in, you don’t actually lose the currency you gathered up until that point. Dungeons, however, require you to turn in your leftover gems before you may enter. This is the only thing you actually ‘lose’ in this game. From here on out, it’s somewhat of a grind to upgrade your passive and active skills (or items).

The game has two currencies. You have coins, which you can basically find everywhere, and these are just used for items in your own house or to open chests in dungeons that give you gems, the second type of currency. These gems are used for your upgrades, build new buildings in your town and some other activities. Mostly you’ll spend these on damage, health and stamina upgrades, or to unlock new classes. After a while, upon purchasing new buildings, you can also upgrade your items with the aforementioned gems. The game turns into a grind-fest, where you will try to accumulate more and more gems to buy upgrades. Sadly, you can only get these gems in dungeons, and upon entering them, they will take all the gems you were carrying making them lost forever.

As just mentioned, the game also has you build up the town from scratch. Most of the buildings you unlock will serve the purpose of upgrading your character. After a while, you can also build houses for NPCs you come across during your travels, making the town a hustling and bustling place to be. It does give you a small incentive to keep grinding a bit more, to make sure you end up with your own personal little pixilated town.

While the overall concept and idea of Rogue Heroes is a lot of fun, the execution, as well as the truckload of bugs, make it very frustrating to play online. The game constantly has syncing errors, where one player cannot pass an obstacle that is not on the other player’s screen, or even walk through enemies, etc. Even during an instance, where we carried the remains of a fallen fellow adventurer to a resurrection altar, the altar would be used, but the other player would remain dead, even though we received the cinematic of him reviving. Other cases also involve beating a dungeon’s titan, to die by an effect he causes, skipping the cinematic of the temple in the center. This made the game think that we beat the dungeon, while the dungeon quest would remain open.

Also, the class system is a bit bland. You actually just get a variation of the base stats (and costumes) and have a skill per character. One may charge its enemies, another has a dodge, and so on. These little variations can spice up the gameplay a bit, but when picking a ranger, who is apparently adept with a bow, it’s quite disappointing having to rely on your sword, just like every other class. Each class is a reskinned version of the first class, where one has a higher damage output, the other moves quicker and others have more mana or life points.

Conclusion

Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos is a game that plays well in a single-player format, but fails to entertain people who wish to play together online. Offline co-op is still a hard thing with lockdowns still being in effect all around the globe but the online options are just too buggy for people to enjoy themselves. The constant syncing errors and random crashes make you lose progress or even force you to shut down the game because you are just completely stuck. While bugs can always occur and happen in new releases, the sheer amount of them in Rogue Heroes takes a lot of the fun away. Again, as a single-player experience, this one is a lot of fun, but if you’re looking into this game to solely play online with friends, it’s best to avoid this one like the plague.

Ibuki

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Aspiring ninja.

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