If you’ve played my Endless series of roguelike games, you might be curious on just what is new in Rogue Party compared to Endless Quest. A lot! I’ll go over the basics to give you an idea of how much more customization and dynamic gameplay you can expect in the game.
The Open-Ended Class System
In Endless Quest, you generally had to choose one of a few starting abilities to start down a class path. This is opened up more in Rogue Party. More powerful abilities will still require you to have chosen an ability or two first, but instead of selecting between only 3 or 4 skills to become a warrior or holy cleric, you should now get a choice of 6-8 or more.
Expanded Crafting System
You can now craft the best weapons, armor, shields, holy symbols and mage staffs in the game. This system begins with buying a crafted weapon, armor, etc. using adventure points and then upgrading this item at the forge. (Note: Some weapons and armor found while exploring can be upgraded into crafted weapons.)
Runes still play an important part of the process. You can even combine some runes to create more powerful runes. Runes can be both found while exploring or purchased with adventure points. You can even extract runes from some items found while exploring.
The goal of the crafting system is to fix a glaring hole in the open-ended class system. While I’ve tried to create a system that allows a lot of flexibility, weapon choice could come down to random chance of what was found while adventuring. The new crafting system lets you plan for a certain type of character like a thief with two daggers or a bard with a great sword.
Critical Hits and Weapon Types
For those who like to swing a sword or smash with a mace, the combat system has a few major changes. Critical hits now deal a special effect based on the type, so slashing deals extra damage, piercing causes bleeding and crushing weapons stun on critical hits.
Some warrior and adventurer abilities are now tied to weapon types, so you’ll have to wield a crushing weapon to use Shield Breaker or a slashing weapon to use the Slice ability.
A Pantheon of Gods
A major change for clerics is the ability to select from eight different gods. Each god comes with a set of well over a dozen prayers. This prayer selection has some overlap between gods and also grants unique abilities. For example, both followers of the Lightbringer and the Guardian can use the Blessed Blow ability, which can heal the wielder on a successful strike, but only the Guardian can upgrade this to Paladin Strike, which can stack the heal until it spreads to the rest of the party.
The Gods include the Lightbringer, the Guardian, the Earthmother, the Hunter, the Stormbringer, the Unkempt, the Dark One and a Demon Lord.
Special Dungeon Levels…
Of course I can’t go over everything that is new, but rest assured that I’ve only mentioned a few of the big features in this post. One fun addition are special levels which can bring variety, so you might explore a dungeon level were fiery embers are on the ground with a chance of dealing damage or magical surges make your spells more powerful. Sometimes you might not even know what is special until you stumble across it, such as a level with many more traps than normal.
New Control System
While you can still use the touch-based movement of Endless Quest, the game now defaults to an on-screen gamepad for movement. The middle button of the gamepad is for targeting and a small button on the lower-right corner of the screen will switch targeting mode to party members instead of enemies. Abilities appear on the left side of the screen, so you can easily play the game with your thumbs.
Rogue Party Game Modes
If you ever played around running only a single character in Endless Quest, you’ll be pleased with the Solo mode. This allows characters of up to 22nd level (20 is the max for full parties), but adventuring alone is quite dangerous. For those that like a friend, there’s a Duo mode as well. But the game might be at its best in the old-fashioned 4-character Party mode.
Rogue Party is available on the Apple App Store.
You Can Also Download Rogue Party from the Google Play Android Store