Rogue Islands review – A Darksouls Minecraftian Skyrimzed game.
Exactly, someone fused these games together to bring you one game, with a proper identity. It’s not a masterpiece, but its godible and more than everything else, is fun to play!
Videogame industry is the same as an artisans exihibition, where everyone shows their creations while the others are watching and replicating. There are games that made up new genres which there never been here before and we’d never image them. When Miyazaki took in charge what would end up a failure project, even him never knew that Demon’s Souls would be an amazing success after the release.
Markus Alexej “Notch” Persson made Minecraft in his room in java language when Mojang was just in his head. He’s a guy with videogame passion, like all of us, with a bit of knowledge of java which he was studying.
The rogue-like genre requires a formula that never changes: dungeon random generated, fantasy locations, (someone adapted this genre with scifi enviroments) lots of monsters to kill and one life is permitted, lost that life means the loss of everything you made on that playthrough.
Frankly, I never found a meaning to all of this, because when you lose your life, you lose everything and I never liked that. But this is just how drugs works.
What happens when you mix Souls games with Minecraft, giving the result a rogue-like style gameplay?
Rogue Islands it’s a Dark Souls Minecraftian Skyrimzed game. Exactly how the title says, it’s a rogue-like game, we’re on a island which at every beginning of the game is random generated. The objective remains the same though: Find the Demon Portal and close it. The Demon Portal is the cause that brought ruin and demons to the gnome world, which once they lived in peace on their islands.
And between us and the Demon Portal lies lots of super dangerous enemies, permanent deaths and many status that our alter ego – a wizard gnome – goes through. It will happen for example, at the first hours of the game you never played, that you’ll end up stepping on a nettle which will cause you’re blood poisoned. And when you’re blood is poisoned, you won’t regenerate health… which if you run out of it, you die. Our gnome wizard can perform various magic attacks that can kill enemies. You’ll have blue magic, green earth magic, and red fire. To use them all you’ll have to find their magic wand per each one, hide all around the map, with many other elements that you can gather which you can use to craft item that you’re probabily going to need to survive this experience.
Rogue Islands offers an FPS interface where your weapon as you imagined its a magic wand. On the bottom right there are three bars that I didn’t understand which one was for but more or less, one for mana, and the other two needs to be better understood. By the by, near the three bars we got a heart that shows our health, and next to it there is a square that indicates our stomach, which needs to be filled so we don’t end up with our wizard saying “I’M STARVING” everytime, we our health being reduced. The more you’re health reduces, the more… you die.
The other squares appears when you go through a malicius (or good) status, that can be “That was traumatizing!” it appears very random and often and it reduces the mana regeneration. Clearly, both poison and trauma can be cured by a Gurgleweed which can be found often under water, when there are… fishes ready to eat you. By the way, the permadeath it’s not exactly permanent because there is a mechanic that lets you respawn via “Nightmares”, you’ll wake up, as if from a nightmare. They need to be crafted though, so… good luck with your permanent deaths.
Graphics are very nice and cured, lights and shadows give you awesome atmosphere (night’s special). Cubes vantage is that is simple to apply textures on them and more than that it’s simple to create every islands since there is that algorithm that lets you random generate an island at every beginning of the game. Maybe the interface should be more elegant, minimal. Those lines are way too big and bold, with the result of colors being too invasive and excessive.
Rogue Islands is a strange game, because since the main menu you can hear a sountrack that can be dark and it feels dispersive a great atmosphere for such a intimidating and severe game, with maps that can be very dangerous, full of menacing enemies. This ruins it all with our gnome wizard screaming and saying “ugh!” or groaning with a little, shrill voice.
Rogue Islands is good looking, even though seeing the same enemies and colors can feel a bit repetitive. Besides that, like every rogue-like its replayability feels nice, because you’re going to end up playing 2-3 session per day, until you get satisfied with your results. These islands hides lots of secrets and upgrades for our gnome wizard, so you can have every playthrough different.
You can grab the game on Steam!