Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos reminds me of A Link To The Past in an okay-ish way, a special kind of affect that I would attribute to other games from my past like Graal Online. A somewhat fine experience, Rogue Heroes is a bit unfocused and makes strange decisions on the multiplayer side, but overall I had fun with my friends playing it. It’s certainly neat and if you’re in the mood for some co-op adventuring, it might occupy your time for a bit!
The core loop of the game is fairly simple; across a large item-gated overworld there are a few procedurally generated dungeons that you must beat in order to go and challenge the final boss. While exploring, you find gold and items that can be used for various purposes, such as powering up your characters and allowing you to explore new paths. In dungeons you’ll get gems that are used for a ton of things, mostly character improvements as well. If your whole party dies, you’re kicked out of the dungeon, but you can spend your gems to power yourself up and try again. Everything is very Link To The Past-like, so you’ll use grappling hooks, hammers, fire arrows and throw boomerangs.
The multiplayer was the main hook for me, and while it’s really fun to solve puzzles and progress as a group, some of its design weren’t exactly my cup of tea. The game being paused for everyone if someone accidentally enters a menu, talks to an NPC or uses some specific items, the screen inconsistently shrinking to show all characters, but more often than not just scrolling to focus on someone specific, everyone being able to change rooms - which sometimes causes chaos, the friendly fire on some items but not all of them…
Overall, the gameplay experience is fun by itself, there are a bunch of classes with powers of varying uselessness that you can unlock, and you have tools and spells to use alongside your main attack, although it’s a bit of a shame that you have so little mana to use magic and most items cost gold or rare charges to use, so I barely interacted with that part of the game. You can upgrade your stats in various ways, unlock new (also almost useless) class upgrades with secret orbs you get from exploring the world. It’s a fun core loop, but it never feels balanced or extremely satisfying.
Overall Rogue Heroes works, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and as I’ve said earlier, it’s a neat multiplayer Zelda-like adventure. Just don’t expect something incredibly tight or bulletproof design!
