Lost Castle 2 is a beat ’em up roguelite game where you explore abundant treasures and items to enhance yourself, master various weapons to showcase your skills, and challenge powerful monsters to demonstrate your strength. A new adventure is calling for treasure hunters!
Developed by: Hunter Studio
Played on: Steam
Length: 10 hours (Early Access only)
A review key was provided by Hunter Studio.
This review was supposed to be published earlier, but I was playing the game so much that I forgot to write the review. Now, let’s dive into it.
Lost Castle 2 is a cooperative 2D beat ’em up roguelite where you play as a treasure hunter travelling through different biomes until you reach the Black Castle to loot and plunder great treasures. You can play the game as a single player or with a party of four, but for this review, I played the game as a single player.
With weapons being the core of every roguelite game, Lost Castle 2 features eight weapon types with each weapon having their own subtypes. An example of this is a musket, which can either be a machine gun, a shotgun or even a mortar. The game provides a huge range of weapons for players to test and find their perfect preferred choice.
Each weapon or armour found during your run has different enhancements that can be reforged, giving that extra step for players to really fine-tune their upgrades to their play style. You can also build different characters with treasure, the in-game items that you find during your run that grant different buffs, from increased damage to summoning magic missiles every five hits. At the moment, there are 194 (yes, I counted) treasures for players to test and figure out which ones work together.
Lost Castle 2 features seven main biomes for players to explore within five levels, with the first level and the last two always being the same biome for narrative reasons. Its level design and character design come alive in a CalArts-esque style, which strikes just the right balance betwen cutesy and gruesome. This only makes the developer’s take on each biome stand out even further, especially to the sandy or snowy biomes in the 2nd and 3rd levels.
Even the monsters within each biome act differently, which adds a nice touch of variety when playing the game. It definitely made me more engaged and attentive when I was fighting them instead of just mindlessly spamming one fight style with my weapon of choice during that run. Each biome features two to three bosses, with each boss having their own quirks in battle. That’s about twelve unique bosses with their own special fighting styles that you will need to learn and adapt to!
On top of that, the colour themes picked for each biome are very distinct while keeping the UI of enemy attack warnings still very visible, so kudos to the art team for the great choice of colour palette.
In terms of replayability, Lost Castle 2 offers a greater challenge with its Ethereal Nightmare mode, which acts as the post-end game. You can pick different difficulties, such as lower health, increased damage or increased status ailments on you, to name a few. This adds the right amount of spice if you’re looking to keep playing the game while keeping the experience fresh.
But even as a single player, Lost Castle 2 is pure fun. The fighting feels great and responsive, the variety of weapons and monsters makes each run unique, and the wide range of randomised treasure drops encourages players to have fun experimenting with builds.
Personally, I started playing this thinking I would complete one playthrough for this review, but at the point of writing this, I’m already four full runs in and I can’t wait to jump into my next attempt. If you are a huge fan of roguelites, this is a game you would want to pick up — and I haven’t even talked about how fun it would be with friends!
Verdict: Loading Up My Next Run
Lost Castle 2 is a roguelite beat ’em up that’s just pure fun, even if you’re playing solo. The fighting feels great and responsive, the variety of weapons and monsters makes each run unique, and the wide range of randomised treasure drops encourages players to have fun experimenting with builds. Highly impressive as an early access title, and we already can’t wait to play the 1.0 when it launches.
This article was contributed by Darren Barker, your sleepy coffee-drinking game design student and co-founder of The Cham Drinkers. Follow him on X/Twitter where he posts and retweets about the ASEAN Game Dev scene and cats.
