As much as I generally love games that add roguelike elements to help freshen up their gameplay and provide some variety, I’ll very much admit that it doesn’t always work. At least not very well. Among my favorite staples of roguelikes are periodic perks that allow you to tune your current run in ways that consistently feel unique, and the inclusion of some degree of risk and reward to tempt you with potential power, even if it may be fatal. In terms of the features I tend to be the most skeptical of, procedurally-generated levels tend to be at the top of the list. That isn’t to say they can’t work out well, just having seen so many games dabble with it, unfortunately the majority do it quite poorly.

Unfair Rampage: Knightfall bills itself as a fast-moving action shooter of sorts, with you dashing through partially destructible stages, ideally kicking ass and taking names. To some degree that is the experience that comes through, but its reliance on pretty limited procedural generation I’d argue becomes more of a liability than a help in the overall scheme of things. The first issue is simply that from run to run things just aren’t all that different, the placement of enemies and traps will vary, but not all that much. The second, which is more annoying, is that because the layouts change you can’t assume spots where you can afford to fall a bit as you could easily just fall into nothing.

Even removing those issues from the table though, while the game has plenty of bluster, it doesn’t have the variety and sense of fun to back that up. I suppose that a general lack of enemy diversity and what can often feel like haphazard design with how you’ll need to move through each level really doesn’t help though. An abundance of archers in different spots tend to do a lot of chip damage to you, and when you mix that with some of the game’s traps it can simply be aggravating. The thing is, tough games aren’t a bad thing, but ones where there’s no clear incentive to keep going and persisting, outside of just saying you did it, are quick to get relegated to the backlog, never to be seen again.