Card Battlers and Roguelite games are hands down my favorite genres so I get excited every time a promising new game is released that combines these two genres. Now Rogue Lords isn't exactly a card battler, since, well, there are no cards in it, but it plays close enough to be considered one and to me that's all that matters. It took me several attempts to finally push the button and buy the game over on Steam but when I finally did, I wasn't disappointed at all. More so, Rogue Lords has been one of my top games in 2021 and as you will read below, I can only recommend getting it.
For starters, Rogue Lords is another game iterating on the ever successful Slay the Spire concept but brings more than enough innovation to make it stand out on itself. In Rogue Lords you take the role of the devil who has been banished from reality after his bitter defeat at the hands on Van Helsing. A few centuries later, you return to the mortal sphere with only one goal in front of you: Take revenge on Van Helsing and bring doom to all of mankind. Since you are still weakened by your defeat you can't walk the earth yourself yet but instead have to rely on three of your minions to get the job done.
You start the game with 3 minions available and (as in any good Roguelite) unlock another 6 characters to choose from while you play and progress through the game. Each of these minions comes with its own skills, relics, and special mechanics. Skill progression works like you might know it from the typical card battlers. You start with only a few for each character and gain additional ones after you complete fights or through other events. There's no card draw mechanic in the game and every skill from every minion is available all the time. You have a certain amount of action points which you can use to activate these skills and once you are done with your round, your up to three opponents per encounter will attack you, cast spells, or heal themselves.
If you've played Slay the Spire or any similar game, you'll feel right at home from the get go. The only real difference is that you need to spend energy in order to refresh your skills instead of randomly drawing cards. The absence of the randomness of the draw makes the game a lot more predictable and strategic than your usual Roguelite but also a bit harder. I'll get to that later on. Other than the skill system, there's everything you'd expect from such a game. There are dozens of different relics with unique effects, a lot of different status effects that can be applied to both your own minions and your opponents and countless viable strategies that you can come up with.
The minion system works really well with each minion being better or worse in different areas of the game. There's usually a typical role for each minion that you'll figure out right away, like being a tank or a glass cannon damage dealer, but thanks to the many different skills and relics, there are a lot more, often less obvious options that you can build towards as well. As in most games of the genre, you also can see what your enemies are going to do and thus you are playing the usual cycle of trying to deal as much damage as possible while also trying to avoid being damaged by your opponents.
There's also the genre typical progression grid where you move from encounter to encounter. For what ever reason, the developers decided to make that a fully animated map where you get to walk around with your minions. While the art is looking pretty neat it's honestly a rather pointless feature. Each node, there's one mandatory encounter and sometimes a second optional one. To start it, you walk into its circle and just click start. There's really no finesse to it and it adds nothing to the game. It doesn't take too long to get to the next encounter, though, so it's not really an issue either.
What makes the game really special is the devil's role in it. You are the master of the underworld and after all, the devil never plays by the rules. So you get to change them, whenever you feel like, in (almost) any way you want to. Doing so does cost you some of your life force, though, and if your life ever hits zero the run ends immediately. There are a lot of things you get to do with that essence. You can heal your minions or damage your opponents, steal buffs or remove debuffs, connect nodes on the map that aren't connected, and a lot more. While these tricks are going to win you any individual fight, it's not that easy to restore your life force so you shouldn't waste it unless you really have to. Your minions have their own life pool as well, but they can never die. Once they are down to zero health they become vulnerable and for all damage they receive beyond that you loose that many life. That's going to lead to some very quick defeats if you miscalculate what your opponents are going to do or just don't have any means to prevent a major attack.
The game is sitting at only 74% positive ratings over at Steam and almost all of the negative ratings are because of the game's difficulty. As I pointed out above, there's a lot less randomness to the game than what you might be used to. Because of that, your opponents are hitting way harder than you might expect them when you first start. While you might get away with just putting things together randomly in other games, this is not going to work out very well in Rogue Lords. You really have to plan ahead, anticipate what your enemies are going to do in their next few turns and prepare to counter it. If you use your own life force too soon, you are going to run out of it before you'd really need it.
Frankly, the game might not be the ideal first game of the genre if you are new and just want to try a Roguelite Card Battler. There's a huge emphasis on synergy, both between your minions and their individual skills. The gap between just picking up whatever and actually following a plan is huge and if you fall behind early there's usually no coming back later in the run. Nevertheless, I found the game to be quite rewarding if you really sink your teeth in. If you spend a few hours to really understand what's going on, the difficulty feels a lot fairer and you'll mostly only loose because you make stupid mistakes. Personally, I've completed the game within roughly 27 hours so depending on how used you are to games of the genre it's going to take you a bit shorter or considerably longer to beat it.
Either way, the game is sold at 25€ (so likely 30$) on Steam right now which feels like a rather fair price point for the amount of entertainment you'll get out of it. All things considered, I can only recommend the game, I had a blast playing it and already hope that they'll release a DLC eventually so I can get some more hours out of it. On the downside, there's not as much replay value in it as you'd get from games like Slay the Spire. Rogue Lords follows a campaign that evolves over several chapters so once I've finished it I didn't really feel like starting another run any time soon. Nevertheless, if you like Slay The Spire and the like, chances are you'll really enjoy Rogue Lords as well!
And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!