Rogue Empire: The Prelude

Proper survival games are pretty difficult to design, because they need to encourage replayability and provide the players with as much content as possible. The freedom to choose how your character evolves or how the story progresses is also important, especially in games that feature a strong plot. Hence, it’s no easy task to create a roguelike or an open-world RPG.

Rogue Empire: The Prelude is a short roguelike game that challenges you to stay alive in a fantasy world full of monsters and unruly creatures, as well as explore the said world and unravel its mysteries. It’s more of a demo of what’s to come, given the fact that there’s very little content available at the moment, but you can still have a lot of fun with it for an hour or more.

You play as a hero named Eghoss, although the final version is supposed to let you customize the class of your character at the start. Since you are a warrior, most of your skills come in the form of physical attacks with various melee weapons, although this is obviously just a taste of the final experience. As always, your equipment plays a major role in every confrontation, so it’s important to collect everything that looks powerful enough.

The combat is as simple as clicking on enemies, but sometimes that’s not enough to come out alive of a fight. Hence, there are all sorts of potions that come in handy when things get rough, although it’s wise to hoard some of them for even tougher times. Boss fights are as difficult as you might imagine, so it’s always a good idea to have a few health potions stashed.

Lastly, the graphics feature the classic top-down view, which is great for the genre. However, better textures would have been a nice touch, because in this case everything looks rather repetitive and simple. When you spend hours exploring dull maps and fighting the same pixelated enemies one after the other, you are bound to get bored sooner than expected.

In the end, the full experience should be a lot more interesting that Rogue Empire: The Prelude lets on, because the repetitive graphics and simple gameplay can get annoying after a while. However, this is but a prelude to show you what the full experience is going to be like, so it’s not worth comparing it to the final product.