Doesn't appeal to me, sorry. :)

Rogue Legacy, in my opinion, is just amazing, I wonder how long your bloodline can be? I think I've dies several thousand times and it just keeps going, and going, and going...

If you did, everyone else would be 100% losers. ;)

If you like Risk of Rain you are probably going to love A Valley without Wind from Arcen Games. It's not on GOG, sadly.

I personally far prefer the first AVWW to the second but nowadays you get both together for the same price so you can look into the second game as well if you like the first.

Thanks, I have both of those languishing in my backlog. I'll give them a try!

Tried it out last night, it is fun alright. Still trying to figure out how to do certain things (like build farms for my starving new community), but that's part of the appeal. Looks like there is a lot to do in the game. Thanks again for the recommendation!

So far so good :) I've played the game 21 times (always on normal difficulty) and managed to win 5 times (Engineer, Sniper, Acrid, Miner and once again Engineer).

I made a stupid mistake as Enforcer and accidentally raised my shield while I was pressed against the wall while fighting a huge number of mobs. It was the last level, in the armory so I had a pretty good chance to win. Stupid mistake, dire consequences ;)

I've unlocked every character and quite a lot of items (on statistic page it says that the game is 62.90% complete). Some achievements seem to be nigh impossible (getting to the 3rd stage without being hurt once? WTF?!) but at the beginning I thought that beating Spelunky is absolutely impossible and after some time I killed Yama several times so impossible is nothing ;)

Engineer is probably the easiest character, Sniper is the coolest (if you do it correctly you can actually kill a boss with one single shot! How awesome is that?) In my last playthrough I've unlocked Huntress and Mercenary so I can't say anything about them.

I only have one major complain: in later levels (especially the last one) there are so many mobs, projectiles, XP orbs, coins, drones and ghosts that the game lags terribly (even with a decreased quality and my computer can run games like Alan Wake) and what's even worse - you can't see a damn thing in this mess. It's bad because it's hard to play tactically in this circumstances. I usually just keep running and letting my drones do the job. There should be an option to switch of coins and XP orbs, you collect them automatically anyway so they should be just added to your stats without showing them. It would make the last level so much better! Fortunately the last boss fight doesn't suffer from this problem and is absolutely awesome!

TL;DR I have a blast playing it!

Clearly I suck, having played it 46 times with no victory yet. But I still enjoy it. :)

I can give you three useful hints that increased my performance considerably when I figured them out

Minor spoiler about strategies ahead!

1) Use "use items" A lot. Most preferably - all the time. Don't wait for a better moment, a better moment is right now ;) Seriously, every time the cooling time drops to zero use it again ASAP (if there are some enemies around of course) the sooner you kill your current opponent the sooner you'll reach a next level and it will help you with future enemies. That's why you shouldn't wait for a better moment
2) At the very beginning of the game kill every single lemurian you can spot. Initially they don't have any special abilities so you can kill them easily but they do drop (relatively) a lot of XP orbs. It's your only chance to get a few levels easily. And if you have a dozen or so levels you can kill sand crabs easily and get their XP faster. Seriously, first two minutes should be spend on killing lemurians only.
3) Warbanners stack! If you can drop two or more banners at the same spot you will be affected by all of them at the same time! So if you get a warbanner early place it in a good place (a large plateau is the best for this) and stay there. Kill upcoming enemies and pay attention to your XP level. Try to place next banner as close to the previous one as possible. Repeat as many times as possible. At some point it will make you almost invincible (each banner add 1% of you max HP as a regeneration bonus so I can easily exceed 50HP per second regeneration!), extra fast (your speed will increase and cool down times will decrease) and grant you extra strength. Then you can grind, grind, grind all the way you want ;)

The third hint is more like an exploit, I only used it once but it works nicely ;) The other two (especially the first one!) are, however, universal and you should always use them!

A game can't be called a roguelike without YASD ;)


Thanks - those are good to know (the last one does indeed feel exploity though).

Many games would be better knowing little things like this before playing, so you can get the most fun out of them. Knowing whether to hoard is one of the big things - if I'm playing The Suffering, for example, it would be useful to know that I can use healing items fairly liberally and not worry about being starved for them later, whereas (another example) in Alone in the Dark it sucks to be late in the game only to find out that the healing items you used earlier were incredibly precious and now you can't finish without starting the whole game again from the beginning.

Are there a lot of instagib spike pit type things?

So very true :)


That's also true. In general I don't like it when a game punishes you for not knowing something that you couldn't really predict. Therefore I appreciate when so games try to sweeten it a bit and Risk of Rain does it - most probably you will die during your first playthroughs but you will unlock a few items that will help you with your next playthrough so it's not that bad
Surprisingly enough - none! There is only some falling damage but believe me, it's very limited - I once fell the highest possible distance and I was sure that I would die but AFAIR I didn't even lose 50% of my HP. There are just a few places with something that seems to be a bottomless pit but if you fall there you'll just get respawned next to it without losing any health at all. Or a very small amount, perhaps I didn't see it correctly. But I'm absolutely certain that there are no insta-death falls in Risk of Rain.

Awesome! I was picturing Rogue-like + Platformer instagib killing me because I couldn't angle my controller precisely above the kill-spikes (*cough* UnEpic, looking at you).