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"Lost Castle 2" Review: Progress in Standardization and Differentiation

Marvin

2024-07-27

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Author: MarvinZ

Comment:

Melee weapons are finally not toys anymore.

Lost Castle 2 is a surprise. And the more familiar players are with Lost Castle, the greater the sense of surprise they will get from this sequel.

This sense of surprise comes from the comparison with the previous game. In comparison, "Lost Castle 2" is much more mature. In terms of design in all aspects, "Lost Castle 2" reflects the development of the Roguelike game category in the past 8 years to a certain extent, and every detail tells the story of "progress of the times".

"The Lost Castle", launched by Hunter Studio in 2016, is one of the earliest and most successful independent games in China. Not only does it have a very high praise rate among players, but its sales have exceeded two million copies since its release.

But the huge success of this work cannot cover up its own immature game design problems.

The immaturity of "Lost Castle" stems from both the problems of the game type itself and their own lack of experience.

Perhaps influenced by one of the prototype games, the "Isaac" series, some early Roguelike games often provide players with a number of power-up items that do not fully match the power-up opportunities in the game. This often leads to a rather paradoxical experience in such games: the more carefully the developers design the props and the larger the prop library, the greater the fluctuation in the experience players can get in a single game.

This is the case with The Lost Castle.

"Instability" is one of the most prominent problems of this work. In the treasure chests in the game, consumables, throwing objects and strengthening props are mixed together. When consumables and throwing objects occupy the drop quota, it means that the player's precious strengthening opportunity is wasted. After going through so much trouble to defeat the BOSS, it is a shame to be left with no backup and scattered treasure chest rewards. This is one of the unpleasant memories of "Lost Castle".

The golden treasure chest opened up a pile of fragments

In addition to the limitations of the genre, the lack of experience of the production team also brought about the problem of the monotony of the weapon usage experience.

Because the enemies are very strong and only "jumping" can be used as a regular evasive action in the game, the melee weapons in "Lost Castle" face extremely high risks, so players can only choose safer long-range weapons, such as bows, cannons, and staffs. This means that although the game has designed corresponding weapons for different types of weapons, in the end, those special action modules are always useless and abandoned by players.

Of course, it is somewhat harsh to use today's perspective to evaluate an independent game released in 2016 - under the limited conditions at the time, the gaming experience provided by Lost Castle can still be called outstanding. However, 8 years later, when we face Lost Castle 2, it is inevitable to examine many of the problems left by the previous game.

Judging from the results, Lost Castle 2 lived up to expectations. During my more than 20 hours of experience, I could clearly feel the maturity of the production team in dealing with many problems. Compared with the previous work, Lost Castle 2 has made great progress in the "standardization" of the process and the "differentiation" of the experience.

"Standardization" is one of the key reasons for the progress of Roguelike games in recent years, because it means that the producers have restrained the "randomness" in the core experience of Roguelike, not allowing it to diverge freely, but turning it to "controllable randomness", thus ensuring that players can get a more stable gaming experience in the process.

One of the surprises of "Lost Castle 2" lies in this "standardization".

The most obvious manifestation of "standardization" in the game is the character enhancement system in the game. "Lost Castle 2" expands the use of the game's enhancement props, making them no longer as "isolated" as in the previous game. In the previous game, each enhancement prop only had a separate effect, but in this game, these enhancement props will also provide additional "rune enhancement" attributes.

Probably influenced by the "red, green and purple" three-color attribute system in "Dead Cells", "Lost Castle 2" has developed a "red, green and blue" three-color "rune enhancement" system.

In the game, players can accumulate "runes" by obtaining "runes" or strengthening items. When the number of "runes" accumulates to a certain level, players can activate the corresponding "rune strengthening" effect. For example, in the red "Ashir Rune" system, as the rune level increases, the player's critical hit rate and critical hit damage will increase, and the player will also gain the ability to trigger the "Rune Slash" special effect when attacking.

The "Rune Enhancement" system is a refined summary and improvement of the previous game's enhancement system.

It integrates the previous game's mode of increasing attribute points through attribute stones and obtaining special effects through props, bringing all ways of character enhancement into one system, while adding new changes on top of it.

In the previous game, players did not have much choice in the direction of their own enhancement - because of the very limited opportunities to obtain props, and the completely random and unselectable drops, every growth of the player is "at the mercy of fate". At present, if Roguelike games still use this method to carve out the replayability of the game, it will inevitably appear outdated.

The three-color "Rune Enhancement" system in this game corrects this shortcoming.

The must-try slot machine in "The Lost Castle"

The three-color "Rune Enhancement" system establishes three clear paths for character strength climbing: red for general attack enhancement, green for defensive rebound, and blue for skill enhancement. The establishment of these three paths guarantees the bottom line of the player's character enhancement experience. Even if the player has no idea about the build, he can still get the bottom line of character strength by climbing the "Rune Enhancement" level of a certain color.

"Lost Castle 2" has sorted out many designs in the game with the general framework of the three-color "Rune Enhancement" system, thus completing the "standardization" transformation of the gameplay continued from the previous game. In many details, we can see that this game is designed for a stable gaming experience.

In the previous game, apples, bananas, chicken legs and other recovery items that occupied a large number of drop opportunities were excluded from the drop library in Lost Castle 2. They borrowed the potion mechanism of Dead Cells and designed blood volume recovery into a fixed blood bottle - each level provides a fixed amount of recovery, which is replenished after passing the level.

After reducing the "water" of consumables, the value of the treasure chests in this game has finally reached a drop level that matches their quality, making the basic idea of ​​Roguelike "each treasure chest can bring an improvement" no longer a false idea in "Lost Castle 2".

At the same time, if the dropped items are weapons, armor or props that the player does not need, the player can also decompose them into different resources. By strengthening and enchanting weapons in the store room, and purchasing them, these resources can be transformed into the strength of the character, thus completing the reuse of idle resources in the game.

These "standardized" process experiences, which are composed of a variety of different details, are the answers that Hunter Studio has submitted to the development of Roguelike games. From today's perspective, the writing of this answer sheet can be said to be extremely standard.

Along with "standardization", the core feature of "Lost Castle 2" is its "differentiation" design, which is more noticeable than its predecessor - the most obvious manifestation of this is the design of enhanced props and weapons.

The "differentiation" of the effects of enhancement items is crucial for every Roguelike game. In "Lost Castle 2", the performance in this regard is quite good. While the enhancement items in the game support the "Rune Enhancement" system, they also provide more unique and diverse enhancement effects than the previous game.

Moreover, the linkage effect between these strengthening props is more significant than in previous games - in certain combinations, the chemical reaction between these strengthening props can also stimulate a strengthening effect that is no less than that of the three-color runes.

The linkage of effects provided by the strengthening items themselves, plus the improvement of the "Rune Strengthening" level, constitute the two levels of Build in this game. The resulting multiple decision-making dimensions make the character growth experience of "Lost Castle 2" more interesting.

Unfortunately, the "differentiation" of the design of the strengthening props in "Lost Castle 2" can only be regarded as qualified because of the number of props. Because in the current version, the props provided by "Lost Castle 2" to players still have many omissions. Except for the relatively complete strengthening system of the three-color runes, the attribute build systems such as fire and frost are not complete and diverse enough.

They still need to update more power-ups during the Early Access phase to bring this system to its full state.

The presence of the freezing attribute in the current version is very weak

Compared to the unfinished work in terms of strengthening props, the breakthrough in weapon design of "Lost Castle 2" is quite complete. Not only did they design an independent and complete action system for each weapon type, but they also highlighted the characteristics of each weapon to a great extent. This makes the weapon use experience in this game particularly distinct, and changing weapons has a huge impact on the player's playing style, which is quite similar to the "Monster Hunter" series.

Interestingly, compared to the two long-range weapons "staff" and "bow and arrow", the four melee weapons "one-handed", "two-handed", "dual swords" and "vortex gun" in this game are more impressive.

The "sword and shield" system represented by "one-handed weapons" makes the "shield" the core of the player's dealings with the enemy. When holding a "one-handed weapon", the player can obtain another universal solution to deal with enemy attacks besides dodging - "blocking". At the same time, in addition to "blocking", there are also derived actions such as "shield charge", "shield counter", and "shield attack". This has changed the combat interaction logic in "Lost Castle 2" to some extent, making "defense" a part of "offense", and also giving the "one-handed weapon" a very high performance ceiling - the more familiar the player is with the game and the enemy's actions, the more they can unleash the potential of this type of weapon.

The new look of "one-handed weapons" in this game is the epitome of the weapon design of this game. Every weapon type in this game has its own unique experience like "one-handed weapons".

The heavy weapons represented by "two-handed weapons" can obtain various additional attack effects through "charging power"; the "dual swords" can accumulate combo points through high-speed attacks to release "one-hit kill"; the "vortex gun" is the most special. It transforms the "transformation" series of weapons in the previous game, allowing it to switch back and forth between different forms such as spears, cannons and sledgehammers through the "vortex boost" action.

Not only that, the complete form of the weapons in this game will not be fully unlocked until the player reaches the middle and late stages of the game and begins to "enchant" the weapons.

In the game, "weapon enchantments" have the ability to change the basic performance of weapons. For example, the "enchantment" of "one-handed weapons" has an entry that allows the weapon's "shield counter" ability to be triggered fixedly, and the "enchantment" of "staffs" also has an entry that allows the attached "satellites" to change from launching energy balls to launching lasers, turning it into a "dragoon system".

Weapons are given unique basic performance, and players are given the ability to customize weapon performance through "enchantment" in the subsequent process. This makes the gaming experience of "Lost Castle 2" not only vary greatly due to weapon selection, but also due to the choice of "enchantment".

Such a distinctive and outstanding weapon system has become the most eye-catching design of "Lost Castle 2", and it is also one of its features that is still worthy of praise in this era when Roguelike has long been flooded.

Of course, if the only evasive method is "jumping" like in the previous game, then the distinctive weapon system can easily become a "dragon-slaying skill". Therefore, "Lost Castle 2" uses "rolling" instead of "jumping", which also makes the weapon system of this game successful to a certain extent.

"Rolling" has better evasive performance than "jumping", and its ability to cancel almost all of the player's attack actions or backswings undoubtedly greatly improves the player's flexibility in this game. The increase in "vertical space" brought about by this increase in flexibility allows each weapon - especially melee weapons - to find its own living space, thus greatly expanding the richness of the game's gameplay horizontally.

As the sequel of the series launched by Hunter Studio 8 years later, "Lost Castle 2" has shown a much stronger sense of design than its predecessor in all aspects. The emphasis on the two characteristics of "standardization" and "differentiation" has made "Lost Castle 2" a more stable and excellent experience than its predecessor.

However, while it has made great progress, "The Lost Castle 2" has also lost some of the "crazy fun" that its predecessor had.

In the previous game, the "bad taste" and "little ideas" of the creators were hidden everywhere in the process - such as the baby Tyrannosaurus Rex that can be fed with chicken legs, the potion that causes diarrhea after drinking, the hidden door that requires money, etc. These things do not play a key role in the whole process, but they provide a rather absurd flavor for "Lost Castle".

In "The Lost Castle", the little Tyrannosaurus Rex was killed by the big Tyrannosaurus Rex

This "nonsense" flavor is unfortunately mostly lost in "Lost Castle 2": the baby Tyrannosaurus Rex has become a cute pet in the camp, the hidden room has disappeared, and the potions that brought a variety of interesting effects have also lost their presence in the game.

From the subsequent experience, these elements do not conflict with the "standardized" process of "Lost Castle 2", and the designers do not need to abandon them - a little bit of nonsense fun is harmless and can bring more vitality to the work.

Of course, although this is regrettable, it cannot be completely characterized as a "shortcoming".

Hunter Studio has obviously chosen a rather steady and content-driven design for the sequel. If they can keep on following this path and expand the content to an extremely rich level, then Lost Castle 2 will be much better than the original.

However, as far as the current "early access" version is concerned, "Lost Castle 2" is still quite some distance away from this goal - the end-game process of the game has not been completely completed, and many build systems in the game have not been adequately supplemented.

The current gameplay framework of Lost Castle 2 is theoretically enough to accommodate a larger amount of content. At the same time, the upper limit of this game will also be determined by the volume of its content itself.

Therefore, it might be more accurate to describe the current version of this game as "excellent quality, promising future".

Compared with the huge progress of the first generation, as well as some of its own unique systems, plus the current content provided, "Lost Castle 2" already has a very good foundation. But the final evaluation of this game depends on how much the game experience will be improved by the addition of new content after they complete the update plan prepared for the "early experience" stage.

The hardware configuration specifications for this game evaluation are as follows:

Configuration model

MSI brand host Codex Dark Knight

Motherboard

MSI B760M BOMBER WIFI D5

CPU

Intel i7-13700F

Graphics

MSI RTX4070 VENTUS 2X 12G OC

Memory

Crucial D5 16G 5600

harddisk

Crucial P3 OLUS 1T M.2

monitor

MSI MPG321UR-QD

Product pictures Performance test Product details

3DM Rating: 8