The Rogue’s Tale, by GLHF Games, is a roguelike dungeon crawler rife with nostalgia and very little else. Though shallow and repetitive, it’s initially strangely addicting, perhaps due to the variety of characters one can experiment with. Although once you’ve tried them all, the game begins to fall flat due to the lack of any other interesting qualities.
There is no introduction whatsoever, you are simply presented with a number of stock fantasy characters that you choose from. Then you appear in the 2D dungeon. Overall the title’s graphics are decent and conjure up memories of old console games of the 16-bit era, making this game likely somewhat appealing to retro gamers.
GLHF Games claims that the goal of this game is to “become the greatest warrior” and while leveling is a big part of this rather limited RPG, the other significant aspect is collecting keys of all things. After choosing your character, you travel from room to room collecting these keys in order to unlock the last door that leads to the boss of the map. After defeating big baddie, you begin again on a new map, in search of new keys. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The entire map is covered in 16-bit treasures and enemies. Treasures include boxes with useless gold (which sometimes turn out to be a mimic), health potions, weapons, and armor that raise your stats. There is no inventory system at all, making it impossible to spec your character. Instead, GLHF Games decided to abstract meaningful loot so whatever arms and armor you find simply adds a point to your attack or defense score respectively.
Among the different types of enemies, there are eyeballs, skeletons, dragons, and witches, to name a few. They are pretty well-varied and overall rather decently rendered 16-bit sprites. Unfortunately there seems to be no discernable differences between any of them in combat. Even worse, enemies will not go out of their way to attack the player. Instead, they seem content with just jumping around the room without interest in the player at all, with the exception of the enemy resembling the grim reaper. Of course, when they move out of the darkness, they might happen to land on the player and thus initiate a battle, but otherwise the player can just wait out an enemy before moving themselves.
Combat is simple and ultimately boring. When a battle begins the player has the choice of hitting attack or running. After which an automated battle begins which consists of the player and the monster whacking each other over the head until one dies, or the player decides to hit the ‘run’ button. Each of the game’s playable characters have one special move, which is the third combat button. Combat dynamics consist of hitting the attack button, the sole purpose of which is to initiate combat; tapping the special move button when it powers up, and optionally hitting the run button if it looks like you’re about to die, or you’ve played Rogue’s Tale for over 15 minutes and simply wish to. The “fun” of combat involves waiting for the special move to power up. Then, you guessed it, you get to press the button.
The player can manipulate the game a bit by running from battle if they’re running low on health, for which they’ll take only a small amount of damage as a penalty. Then they can grab a potion on the ground, and reenter the battle with the enemy having the same amount of health. Ultimately, this makes battles rather easy, especially when there are plenty of health potions in one room with extremely difficult enemies (including the boss at the end of each map). True to its namesake, Rogue’s Tale is a roguelike, so when you die in combat you are dead and you are only given the option of restarting the game from the beginning. While fans of roguelikes will likely enjoy this element, it’s not enough to sustain this title. This is a “role-playing” game with no story at all, not even a single sentence. It’s also missing bona fide weapons and armor, an inventory system an attribute and a skill system. In short, there is very little here that can be called role-playing.
While graphically Rogue’s Tale does kick up some nostalgic memories, it becomes repetitive rather quickly. The player goes through room after room in search of weapons, armor, and keys, levels up by fighting extremely boring battles in order to fight a boss, after which they start the process over again from the beginning. While there may be some appeal to committed roguelike fans, little here will appeal to hardcore gamers. Role-playing fans would do much better picking up an Android RPG title that has things like a story, useful loot, a skill system, cool weapons and armor and interesting battles and is, well, a video game that delivers actual role-playing rather than a shell of an RPG.
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Is it Hardcore?
No.
it may bring back nostalgic memories of the 16-bit renditions of early console games, it falls flat in the face of authentic role-playing games.
