Roving Rogue starts off in the best possible of way, but within a few levels manages to lose everything that makes it special. This is a shame, not because Roving Rogue is a bad game, but when a good concept and idea fall apart it becomes more infuriating than if it were simply a crap game. There aren’t many games out there that give us new gameplay and story ideas, so when one does that and fails to deliver on any of its promise, it makes me angry. Think of it like you having a game like Skyrim, but instead of Bethesda making the game, you instead have LJN making it.
Roving Rogue breaks the mold by pulling a Memento moment on gamers. You begin the game at the final boss fight with no control over the action as our hero fells the final boss. It’s a shock to the system seeing the end of a game, but things really get interesting as soon as this encounter ends. You see, after killing the final boss in the castle you manage to lose all your memories of who you are, what you are doing there, and how the hell you got there in the first place. It’s a genius idea that opens up the game to explore a number of facets involving memory loss and exploring areas and monsters that you’ve already seen. The idea that everything is new to you, but enemies have already seen you and probably better understand your tactics could really offer up a lot of fun. Unfortunately, this never comes to pass as the story never dives into any of the awesome ideas it sets up.
Instead you will traverse the castle in reverse, making your way back to stage 1 to find the exit and hopefully unlocking the story as you go. Once again this opens up a number of cool ideas with regards to enemies, story, and gameplay. In most games ever made, the early levels are the simplest that are there to teach you the mechanics of the game. Being forced to start at the end of a game is risky, but with good level design and inventive enemies this could be an interesting experience. But once again Roving Rogue drops the balls and ignores what could have been something special. Just as in any other game the levels will build in difficulty as you work your way out of the castle. There are no bosses to fight and the story is tossed out at your via pre-level text that plays upon the social media style of heavy hashtag use instead of building upon the games excellent story ideas. You can unlock the jumbled story pages in your journal, but this requires collecting hard to reach items in each level, something that you won’t want to do.
This would all be fine and not kill the game if the gameplay was really strong and inventive, and while Roving Rogue does show glimmers of awesome, its core mechanic that you will rely on is inherently broken. Our hero is some sort of mystical ninja that has the ability to teleport short distances on command. This is a really cool mechanic that offers up a lot of fun initially, but as the game ramps up the precision it demands from you, you see that this teleport mechanic just can’t cope. While you can’t teleport through most walls, you can pass through special gold-laced walls and ledges on your way through levels. Some levels are presented in a standard horizontal format with you moving right to left, while other are on a vertical plane seeing you working your way up. All the while the level will begin to be flooded with lava (going up) or a rock cave in (going right), so you’ll have to move quick through each level.
Again, this would be fine is the games mechanics worked well, but they don’t. Holding down a button with initiate your teleport and from here you can choose to bamf in eight directions, unless of course something is blocking your path. In the early game this works great as Roving Rogue features a lot of large open areas that don’t require a lot of perfection, but later on when the game closes in on you the it all falls apart. You have control over how far you can teleport, so you can make a short jump, or make a longer jump depending on which will help you out. The problem comes up because you don’t have full control over which one you can use. Many times you’ll want to make a small jump, but the selection will only appear for a split second before the game shifts it to the long teleport. This really becomes a pain when the game demands small precise teleports. This wouldn’t be all that bad, but since each level has lava or rocks constantly moving toward you, you don’t have the time to make mistakes.
The controls are just too stiff to make the game any fun, so you are going to find yourself playing segments over and over again not because the game is difficult, but because the controls will screw you over. Roving Rogue quickly turns into a game of frustration so fastthat I wonder how nobody spoke up during development. Something as simple as removing the instant kill lava/rocks in each level would have really opened up the game. You have to play to your strength and gloss over your weaknesses when it comes to game design, but with Roving Rogue they decided to place more focus on mechanics that just aren’t up to par. That’s a real shame because the game starts off so strong and gives you every indication that your will be playing something special, but quickly drops the ball.
The game also features a number of enemies along the way, but you have no weapon to deal with them. Instead you can pull a Mario and dispatch them by jumping on their heads, or by walking up behind them to initiating an auto kill. These enemies aren’t ever a real problem and instead serve as more of a nuisance to the player. Instead of using cool enemies to mix things up the developers just decided to add more and more to each level as you progress. Instead of the difficulty increasing because of design, the game just adds in more enemies in your path to annoy you. This really becomes a problem during the last few stages as there is so much going on that the games FPS drops to what feels like single digits. There were many occasions that it felt like I hit a “slow-mo” button like on those crappy third-party controllers.
Roving Rogue also has a number on annoying glitches (I’m not counting the overly precise teleport mechanic as a glitch) that will directly lead to many a death. There are times when you’ll teleport near an edge and your character will just lock up. Sometimes you get stuck on edges if you don’t bamf onto the correct part. You can quickly tap the control stick to break this lock, but in the later stages when you need to move your ass, or when a hundred enemies are shooting you, this will become a nightmare. There were also time when I had a clear path and the teleport target was in the right spot, yet I was teleported someplace I didn’t want. The game does offer up a number of enemies, but only one will let your know that they have seen you. The Goblin archers will get a flashing yellow and red exclamation mark over their heads when they see you, giving you a chance to jump and avoid their arrows, but if one is alerted and you get killed by another enemy during that time, upon reset of the checkpoint they will still have their exclamation mark even though they don’t see you.
Finally we get to the music which just becomes irritating since only a single track plays through every single stage. It’s not a bad track in and of itself, but after hearing it for the 300th time you are going to want to hit mute. When you get to the last set of stages the music will change, but instead of getting a new track you just get a drum and bass remix of the same one you have head already. Still, when this happened I actually stopped playing because it was so jarring hearing something/anything new. It should also be noted that the game offers up 4-player multiplay, but the game doesn’t scale for this so having more people on the screen does not make the game any more fun than playing alone.
Roving Rogue has a lot of issues, but it isn’t a terrible game. The problem is that it presents such lofty ideas and gameplay elements and fails to deliver on any of them which makes me look upon it much harsher than I would normally. There were so many little changes that could have been made (and still possibly can in an update) to make Roving Rogue into something really special, but in the end the team decided to put too much focus on the wrong things, instead of focusing on what could have made Roving Rogue great. Still, I do want to see more from this team as you can clearly see a lot of talent deep down, it just needs to be developed properly in future games. Roving Rogue is available on the Wii U eShop for $7.99
Title: Roving Rogue
Developer: Padaone Games
Publisher: Padaone Games
Platform: Wii U
Price: $7.99
*A copy was provided for this review*
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