Roundguard Review

Someone made a joke about a Peggle roguelike and moments later I discovered that’s actually a thing, in the form of Roundguard. At the most basic concept, that’s what the game is, there’s a round thing that you launch to hit multiple objects on its way to the bottom of the screen.

A bit less generally, Roundguard sees you selecting an adventurer to rescue a king, journeying across three acts and clobbering enemies across each stage. The number of stages will vary depending on the route you take, there’s a map that shows your options, so some runs will be shorter than others. There’s an achievement for launching your adventurer fewer than 90 times, and since there’s a maximum of 45 stages per run, that does seem like an achievement to me!

There are four adventurers to pick from, each with different health and magic stats. Hitting an enemy will damage them, but also yourself, and if you miss the cushion at the bottom you’ll get damaged when you hit the spikes. You can also get attacked by certain foes with projectiles, and sometimes you’ll get poisoned. Luckily, there are health potions in most levels, so your run won’t always end quickly. It’s a roguelike, obviously some runs will end really fast…

Magic points are used to activate abilities, of which there are many and vary depending on your adventurer. The Wizard, for example, can zap enemies with lightning, while The Rogue can fire arrows. That’s just two of the abilities, you’ll find loads but you can only hold two at a time — one for each of the two mouse buttons. If you particularly like an ability, you can find upgraded versions of them if you’re lucky enough.

Roundguard also allows you to upgrade your armour and weapon, which will obviously alter your health and attack stats. Some of them will also grant you passive abilities, such as poisoning enemies or increasing your attack power, but it’s always up to you if you swap out something or just drop it in exchange for some gold.

Speaking of gold, the amount you collect benefits you in two specific ways. There are times when you get to spin a wheel to gain a relic or ability, and the amount of cash you have will decide how many gold-tier prizes are on the wheel. The other benefit is how high up the leaderboards you wind up at the end of your run. Perhaps not as good a prize, but it lasts longer than an ability which vanishes at the end of a run.

The relics, however, can be chosen at the start of a run and will alter gameplay in certain ways. The Mercy relic basically turns on Easy Mode, for example. You can enable or disable as many of them as you want before a run begins, but completing the run with them enabled turns them gold! That’s about it, but it’ll make you feel fancy!

As each Roundguard run is randomised, you will encounter different bosses throughout. You can actually manage to avoid mini-bosses, if you want to, now that I think of it. But they give better rewards, so do you want to avoid them? After you clear the enemies out of a room, you can choose from up to three options, depending on where you are on the map. Sometimes it’s a mini-boss, it could be a Chaos room, or perhaps it’s full of skeletons! Chaos rooms have much better loot but are a bit riskier. There are also treasure rooms, so if you’re low on health or mana then they can help you refill your meters.

The artwork in Rroundguard is cartoonish and really suits the tone that the developer was going for. Occasionally the characters will talk between levels and those can be humorous, but the game on the whole never takes itself seriously. Each run is basically a theatre production, given the fact that there are stage curtains, and the king who you need to save basically shrugs and good-naturedly tells you to try again if you fail.

The music and sound effects are similarly upbeat and light, even when it’s trying to get across how dire things are (low health, boss fights). I do quite enjoy the victory music, though the loop is certainly shorter than some of Square Enix’s best.

Roundguard is perfect for a couple of levels here and there, or if you want a longer gaming session. It won’t be for everyone and can be repetitive despite the randomness, but is overall a lot of fun. I’m not a big fan of roguelikes, but it seems if you mix it with Peggle I’m much more likely to enjoy it. And at least there are no unicorns in this.