Rogue Touch Quick Review

Similar to many other games in this dungeon-crawling genre, Rogue Touch brings the classic incredibly rewarding yet punishing formula of the dungeon crawling classic Rogue to iPhone and iPod Touch. For those who are unfamiliar with the genre, the main draw of these games is that you're put into a random dungeon with randomly located enemies, treasures, and traps, and generally have to descend in the labyrinth as far as possible. Since it's such a simplistic concept, the controls work fine with movement, attacking inventory management, etc, all being controlled by simply sliding you finger across the screen in the direction you wish to move or on the character to use items or manage your inventory. In classic style, you'll come across all types of unidentified items, forcing you to think wisely before you blindly equip that magic ring you found, since it could end up draining your health per turn. Once you die, your characters name will be registered in your hall of fame but you're forced to return to level one with a fresh start, meaning you don't have any of the items you previously found accessible to you. One of the unique features of Rogue Touch is that supposedly you're able to come across your corpse if you adventure long enough and you're able to loot it, taking items and gold that you had when you died and use them on your new character. While the gameplay is pretty addictive, it stays true to the classic art style, meaning you're looking at a more or less top down view of the dungeon, with your character, creatures, and items all represented by simple 2d sprites. Combat is conducted by simply walking into a creature over and over and reading the status messages as the top of the screen that tell you if you had a hit, critical hit, took damage, etc.


(You'll see this. A lot.)

It's worth mentioning that in addition to managing your inventory, you also have to worry about your character's health, which means that you're going to have to hold on to food when you find it and use it when you start to get hungry. As you fight more, you'll eventually level up which refills your health bar and seems to make you a bit more powerful as well. The music in the game is more or less non-existent, which is kind of a bummer since it disables your own music when you start it up with the soft "plop" sound of water every few moments. On the plus side, roguelikes are easily one of the most addictive types of games and having it on your iphone or itouch means you can literally start a game within seconds, turn it off whenever you need to, and as long as you don't die, there's a continue feature on the main screen. The main reason I'm just giving this a 7 is that while I definitely do enjoy it, I realize this type of experience isn't for everyone, especially since you have to realize that you WILL die and dying is a part of the game, not to mention you'll occasionally come across some completely unexpected moments (testing out an unidentified wand that happens to shoot lighting, which then bounces off the wall and kills you after an hour of playing), but it's those moments that make this such an enjoyable game and kind along with giving you clues of what to be careful of the next time you're in the dungeon.

Score - 7/10