RogueJack: Roguelike BlackJack 9+

I'm actually impressed

I really don't get too into mobile or casual games because I'm usually playing something on my PC. I'm very glad to have found this game in the app store because it's fun, it's entertaining, and while the inspiration for this game is very clear, it's still a very original and a lot of fun. I've been playing for a while now and so far I haven't run into any game-breaking glitches or bugs, the art style is simple but does its job very well, and overall I've enjoyed the game very much. Like I said, I don't usually play many casual games because of the ads, pay-to-win tactics, and other annoying things that get crammed into these games. This has absolutely none of that, so I'm sure this will be one of the very few phone games I'll always keep around.

Fun but barebones

Really neat concept for a roguelike. I’ve had minimal glitches and the controls feel functional and simple. The blackjack mechanic is interesting and a neat spin on combat. The biggest issue I have is there’s not to much variety. There seems to be only 15 or so items, around the same amount of enemies, and rather than a class system or a skill tree (which would have been really neat for this game) there’s a linear xp based upgrade system. The only real form of combat manipulation is doing more damage and viewing your cards before you draw them. It’s fun for a couple hours but begins to feel tedious afterwards due to the lack of variety. I’d suggest simply adding more items and reworking status effects and making new combat effecting mechanics, as the status effects don’t feel vary powerful at all and taking more damage usually feels universally better. Runs are sort of samey at the moment, leading to limited replayability which is a huge selling point of rougelikes and would lend itself well to a game like this. Still though, fun game and good time waster.

Imperfect by design

For as much as I love the concept of this game for its creativity and strategy, the very concept of blackjack-based combat is what makes this game so frustrating to play. With each level requiring more XP, I would expect to be able to get further each time I leveled up, but this is not the case. The mage is worse than the prophet, and more XP is needed, making leveling up that much harder. Requiring all XP to be obtained in a single run, while understandable, means that you have to be the luckiest you’ve ever been in order to level up, and this can get frustrating from a gameplay perspective knowing that ultimately, no matter how you play, you are at the mercy of the cards—something especially aggravating after having the ability to see them taken away. I’d change the order of the classes.

There are other smaller issues as well:
- Keys are obtained not from a random enemy, but from the last enemy, forcing you to completely clear the floor to continue
- The shortsword (“gleeming”) and the Fuegomaker (“ememy”) both have misspellings in their descriptions
- The XP gotten from looting your grave is directly related to the amount you currently have, as far as I can tell, making the use of the altar extremely damaging to the player, as it requires them to have an even more perfect run to reach their grave normally—the only way to get significant XP from it.

Developer Response ,

Thank you so much for the feedback. So the grave gives you roughly 90% of your XP from your *best* run, so you only need to earn about 10% of your current level to push the game forward. Once you start getting more cards, it gets easier but then the monsters get harder. But once you start streaking it's pretty satisfying.

Not to defend the design, it is what it is, but Blackjack is a very unforgiving game in general and what we tried to do is level it in a way that you can progress. Also, Rogue-likes are rough and tumble as well, so putting them together in a friendly way was a challenge.

We're getting ready to add multiple languages, so those spelling errors snuck into the last build as we databased up all the text. It will be fixed shortly, and thanks for pointing it out!