Rogue Empire: Dungeon Crawler RPG

Fun so far

Rogue Empire: Dungeon Crawler RPG, developed by Portal Entertainment, is a love letter to old-school roguelikes wrapped in a modern user interface. Beneath its pixelated surface lies a surprisingly deep experience with randomized worlds, permadeath tension, and just enough narrative to keep you pushing deeper into the darkness.

It may not have the flashiest presentation, but for fans of strategic combat, procedural dungeons, and character customization, Rogue Empire is a hidden gem that punches well above its weight.

At its core, Rogue Empire is about survival, exploration, and tactical decision-making. You choose from a range of races and classes, then dive into turn-based grid combat across procedurally generated dungeons. The moment-to-moment gameplay is classic roguelike: tight corridors, traps, hidden loot, and a steady stream of monsters to overcome.

What makes it shine is the sheer variety of systems. You’ll find magical weapons with randomized effects, dozens of skills to unlock, pets that can fight by your side, and a hunger system that adds constant pressure. The game rewards patience, planning, and a willingness to learn from each brutal defeat.

Rogue Empire offers both a Campaign Mode and a more traditional Challenge Dungeon. The Campaign has a light story and a world map with multiple dungeons to conquer, while the Challenge Mode focuses on pure roguelike survival. Both are packed with replay value.

Classes like Assassin, Wizard, and Beastmaster play dramatically differently, and the game encourages experimentation. Some combinations are devastating. Others? Less so—but failure is part of the fun.

The game's leveling system is flexible, letting you shape your hero through attributes, gear choices, and a skill tree that opens up as you go. Every run feels distinct.

Let’s be honest—Rogue Empire isn’t winning any beauty contests. Its pixel art is serviceable, but lacks the polish and cohesion of higher-budget indie titles. That said, enemy sprites are distinct, spell effects are clear, and the UI is surprisingly intuitive given how many systems are at play.

It’s not ugly—it’s just humble. And in a genre built on ASCII roots, that’s almost part of the appeal.

The soundtrack is minimalist but effective, offering ambient tracks that don’t distract from the gameplay. Sound effects get the job done, though they're not particularly memorable. It’s clear the focus is on gameplay over immersion—but you’ll be too busy trying not to die to notice much.

One of Rogue Empire’s strengths is its ability to cater to both hardcore roguelike veterans and more casual players. While permadeath is present (and brutal), you can toggle various options to make the experience more forgiving, such as save slots or tutorial tips.

However, the difficulty curve is sharp. Some enemies can wipe you out if you're not prepared, and environmental hazards can feel unfair at times. But if you're looking for a challenge that respects your intelligence, this is it.

Rogue Empire is a passionate, well-crafted roguelike that nails the fundamentals and adds just enough depth to keep you coming back. It’s not the most polished or modern-looking game out there, but its smart systems, strategic gameplay, and replayability make it worth the dive for genre fans.

Pros:
-Deep character customization
-Excellent turn-based tactical combat
-Multiple modes and races/classes
-High replay value

Cons:
-Dated visuals and basic animations
-Occasional balance spikes
-Story and writing are functional, not compelling

If you're craving a no-nonsense roguelike dungeon crawler with satisfying depth and strategic challenge, Rogue Empire is a strong pick—especially for fans of games like Tales of Maj’Eyal or ADOM. Just be prepared to die a lot... and love it.

Rating: 8/10

6/10

Reminds me a little of some other Roguelikes, but slightly better. Some other Roguelikes feel punitive & unnecessarily unfriendly to new players, while this one is a little more plain *fun*... though apparently it can be quite challenging if you'd like it to be. It does have significant autoexplore issues, item/enemy visibility issues, and unnecessary complexity that hold it back from a higher score.

Rogue Fable 3 is much better in almost every category. It'll be tough for another Roguelike to ever dethrone RF3. Maybe possibly RF4 will.

Pros:

- Good music

- Can zoom in/out a *massive* amount

- Tons of difficulty and game/campaign options, including no permadeath

- You can actually change movement/autoexplore speed. This is *huge* for me as I hate when it's so fast my character is effectively teleporting & I don't know how they got there

- Lots of character stats, equipment slots, etc. There's a lot of depth, but it's not overwhelming

- Nice color palette. Not boring or murky like many games

- I love the glowing effects you see with some spell effects, leveling up, portals and whatnot

- Really cool levelup sequence. You also get "cards" which are semi-random skills, usually passives but not always

- Has a combat log, which is fantastic for knowing what's going on and for learning the game

Mehs:

- Characters extremely ugly with massively huge heads. I wish there were more character appearance options since you're staring at them for countless hours

- Good enemy variety, but it feels bizarre. Why on earth are all these different things working together in the same room/level? Rogue Fable 3 does this much better with 4 levels at a time with a theme of enemies

Cons:

- Biggest one: it's often very difficult to see items on the ground. Sometimes it's because the height of the tile in front of it blocks your view of it, sometimes it's because background items like rocks look like items, and sometimes it's because it's a similar color as the background. Autoexplore does take you to items on the ground, but only once so if you're not paying enough attention, you could miss stuff. At least gold is automatically looted

- Similarly, sometimes enemies are hard to see because they blend in and/or are partly shadowed due to partial vision (though your character knows they're there)

- Autoexplore takes you to the previous exit when a level is cleared. Rather annoying when you want to go forward, not back... which is almost all the time

- If going back to a previous level, autoexplore takes you to every little thing you had to drop because you couldn't carry it or because it wasn't worth enough to pick up. Very annoying

- Autoexplore stops for barrels, which never seem to have anything useful in them

- Can't stop autoexplore once it's going

- Too difficult to learn new spells early on

- Tons and *tons* of unnecessary items and spells. Rogue Fable 3 is much better at this with fewer but more versatile spells and with fewer garbage items

- Locked door mechanics are unnecessary. Why does the Unlock spell take health from the caster?? Why so many keys? Why does kicking a door do more damage vs literally breaking my leg when exploring on the world map? None of it makes sense and none of it adds to the enjoyment of the game

- Energy system isn't explained and is altogether unnecessary

- Druids can't use any ranged weapons at all? Not even a staff? I don't remember it warning me of that. Lame

- All pets kinda suck. Either they don't follow you or you have to keep casting something to teleport them, and/or they're quite weak. Also, Druids likely won't be learning any summon for a long time, and Mages not for a very long time

- Dev seems so concerned with "balance" that it makes the game less fun for most classes. It's unfortunate

- Boss fights aren't terribly fun

I just beat this game as a Warrior and had a blast! I would highly recommend this game to anyone who likes this genre. It is well-balanced and has a large variety of items, skills and attributes. If anyone has any questions about this game, I'd be happy to answer them. Well done developer!

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i enjoy this game

Very fun game, the interface is awesome, can tell a lot of work went into it, best interface I've seen in a long time. Great class, treasure, abilities variety, highly recommend!

this is a rogue game that tries to be as fair as possible (instead of assuming that you will play 500 hours to learn its most obscure secrets and will eventually make a perfect run in order to beat it)

it is very class based, in the sense that the most important decission is your class from where your skills and most of your stats derive, the base game offers assassin, ranger, druid and mage. it makes the game quite replayable because playing as a mage is totally different in terms of strategy and feeling that playing a ranger or a druid.

the good thing is that if you are careful and you chose the skills accordingly when you level up the game is doable (at least for easy and normal, i have not played in hard mode)

there is a bit of meta progression in the sense that once you complete the game or you die you acumulate a currency that unblocks small improvements, nothing game-breaking but makes your chars better as you make a few runs

the graphics are crispy and the ui is good enough (easily accessible quick keys and no weird shortcut keys to do basic things, almost all the usual things can be done easily with the keyboard or keyboard and mouse)

Twenty five years ago, I would have played this for hundreds of hours. But great as it is, I apparently have only played it 7.7 hours after two years.

As someone who has already beaten both Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and ToME4 that this game takes its mechanics from, I can testify that this is just an inferior game to those that inspired it. Nearly every semi-original idea that this game has over the others does not fit in very well and seems poorly designed. Potions that temporarily raise a certain stat? Why? Have we not grown out of this already? To top it off, I have already encountered a numerous amount of bugs during my 2 hours short gameplay and even without them, the game was just too dull for me to go on.

Hard pass, just because there are SO much better paid alternatives and they are even much cheaper. Just to name Rogue Fable III and Path of Achra as examples.

The controls are really awkwrard, and the visual design of the characters are really character / not the correct scale with the environment. The game mechanicsi itself are good, but the game is pretty poor.

Great roguelike dungeon crawler with nice rpg elements. Some builds are more difficult to master than others, but some of the classes and races are quite unique. It gets a little tiresome near the end of the main campaign, because of the huge amounts of enemies, but overall it's a great experience.

Great turn based dungeon crawler, graphics are pretty nice compared to many in the ''traditional rougelikes'' genre, with a decent number of races, I would prefer more classes (I come from ADOM). There is an infinite dungeon mode that each level enemies get a buff for each level depth it's quite nice. Campaign maps. Each game played gives an amount of currency which you can spend on perma-buffs for future characters generated.

This game could be a nice game, but there are too many QoL and/or polish missing, stuff that's a give in other similar games, and for this reason I don't feel like recommending it. If there was a "neutral" vote, I would rather give that, but since there isn't...

So, these are the things that are irking me the most currently (after roughly 1 hour of play):

1) As a ranger, I hit the key to throw my arrow and point to an enemy, shoot my arrow.
In other similar games, your last living target gets saved so that next time you attempt to shoot an arrow, the cursor jump immediately on top of them.
In this game, my cursor goes to a random crate nearby, often wasting me a turn and an arrow, awful for a game where a 1-turn mistake could cost your run, and this feels like the game tripping you up on purpose.

2) The whole rendering system. If you don't have the zoom at just that one precise zoom level, then every movement generate a lot of vertical or horizontal bands on the background sprite, as the rendering tries to match the sprites to the screen pixels.
It's visually awful and just plain uncomfortable to see, I can't even describe properly how much this is bothering me.

3) No slider for the Font size. The font is so ridiculously big is making reading everything slower than it should be.
And this goes also for the UI (especially the log tab), it's cluttering the whole thing.
There is absolutely no need for a hotkey bar that takes the whole bottom part of the screen, it's simply too big - and if it was made smaller, the log tab could coexist at the bottom of the screen with it (as most game do) eliminating most of this cluttered feeling. This is a clear hint the game was developed to be played on a tablet or small screen device, and ported to PC without properly adapting things to a PC screen size.
Expect everything to look HUGE, you can probably tell already by the screenshots, if you just open them fullscreen.

4) Sometimes you want to use the mouse pointer to hover on a "buff" on the top left and read the description, but then you want to keep playing with your numpad and would like the mouse pointer to disappear as soon as you touch a numpad key, and in many roguelikes it works like that, I was playing Dungeonmans just today and it was that way. In here, you either hide the mouse pointer and can't easily check the buffs, or you don't and you move the pointer out of the way manually every single time =_=

5) There is a "Button Cursor" option you can enable that shows a cursors you can drive with the directional keys to navigate menus without the need of a mouse. Even with the "Button Cursor" enabled and visible, the way it works is clunky and counter-intuitive.
Intuitively (and in most games similar to this) you would use your numpad to move around in menus like the inventory etc..., but in this game, in any of those instances you need to take your hands off the numpad and move to the arrow keys in order to operate this cursor. Man... just... why?! x_x

I've played only 1 hour so far so I'm sure had I played more, I would have found yet more things.
The leveling up system with RNG cards felt very fun for a roguelike, but all the things mentioned above are downgrading this game from "Enjoyable" to just "Playable", at least for me.

This stuff hasn't been rectified so far in 5 years the game was out, so I don't really expect anything changing at this point and this means I can't fully recommend it to you people.
I have hundreds of hours in games like Tome, Rogue's Tale, SoTS: The Pit, Dungeonmans etc... I'm sure many people can overlook those things mentioned above, but for me personally, on this one I had to ask for a refund because I couldn't stand those problems.