⚔️🏹 Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos | Review | Nintendo Switch | 8.5/10 | "Alone or with friends...it’s all good" ⚔️🏹 @Team17 #IndieGames #GameDev

Rogue Heroes: Ruins of Tasos is a game that came across to me through the trailer as a multiplayer 16-bit Zelda title actually had more going on under the bonnet than I initially assumed and is all the better for it.

After you and up to three other companions design your little pixel-art crusaders, you’ll awake in a bare home inside a tiny village with huge possibilities of expansion.

As you wander around, the initial Zelda similarities will be coming at you like flashbacks from Vietnam. The top-down, pixel art, the gently swaying trees and the ability to either slash or yank up shrubbery for health and coins all call to mind Nintendo’s beloved classic.

Don’t be fooled, however. As the game unfolds and you build up your village- following repeated trips to one of the four expansive dungeons (naturally the homes of enormous bosses, good) - it soon becomes apparent that this is a game that covers a lot of genre-ground.

The stamina bar adds tactics to combat and the many upgrades and unlockables to both your characters, character-types and the ever-expanding village mean that there are a lot of RPG elements here. These, combined with the ability to sell fresh produce for profit in the market reminded me of Digital Sun’s Moonlighter. Good.

The design of the game is one of incremental progress. After each run, you’ll spend earned gems on either building some new areas of the town or improving one of the aspects of your character before charging in for another go at those fiendish, procedurally-generated puzzle rooms and enemies.

This is a game that is definitely playable in either single-player or multiplayer and doesn’t feel weighted towards either. A really awesome and yet subtle boon is how each character’s save file is treated entirely separately so you can play alone for a while and other players can dip in and out without affecting a single, shared save, very nice touch. 

Whilst the core gameplay loop is great fun, the game plays smoothly, all is balanced and progress feels incredibly satisfying, the music did feel a tad generic, especially in the town section. This was a bit tiring as it’s the piece of music you get to hear the most often and so the fact it gets old fast is a bit of an irritation.

"Right, I’m off to craft an asthma inhaler so my knight doesn’t get knackered after three swings of his sword."