I’ve been playing a lot of Roguelikes recently. I’ve played a lot of great ones, such as Hades, Dreamscaper, Undermine, etc. However, this has also made lackluster Roguelikes that much more obvious. Zengeon is a punishingly difficult Roguelike that offers multiplayer, stylish-looking combat, and crisp visuals, at the expense of polish and proper progression systems.

The first thing I should mention is that since Zengeon is developed by a Chinese dev, the game has some serious issues with its English translation. The dialogue isn’t terrible, but the language barrier is incredibly obvious. I would have thought that localization would have been a big investment but with this being an indie game I can understand a smaller budget.

Zengeon puts you in the shoes of students from The Celestial Academy, who are meant to protect the world from the Demon God and the Dark Emptiness he controls. During a Lunar Eclipse, the seal keeping the Dark Emptiness and the Dark God at bay breaks, and it is up to you and the six playable characters to save your world from destruction.

The problem is, it is obvious that the developers clearly intended for people to almost exclusively play this in Multiplayer. Why? Well, the Single-Player is so difficult (even for a Roguelike veteran) that I played for over an hour in my first session and rage-quit because I couldn’t even get to the first boss. Now, I know what a lot of people will say: “Well maybe you just suck at this one.”

Maybe, but if I can complete several other punishingly difficult Roguelikes, I highly doubt that is the case. For one, Zengeon has two difficulty levels, Easy and Hard. It starts you out on Easy by default, so I don’t even want to know what Hard is like. According to everything I’ve seen while I did the research for this review, the difficulty ramps up in multiplayer. However, I couldn’t find anyone online while I was playing, so I can’t attest to that.

However, there are two main issues that contribute to the difficulty of the game. For one, there are incredibly large amounts of enemies. The amount of enemies you have to fight is insane, mostly because when you attack them, they don’t stagger or pause their animation to attack you. Your dodge also has a cooldown, so you can’t do the typical Hades or Dreamscaper move of hitting the enemy a few times then dodging away.

I have never really seen a Roguelike that didn’t have some sort of stagger/interrupt mechanic for enemy attacks even occasionally. It makes it almost impossible to avoid damage and, since you can only heal yourself five times unless you break destructibles, it ends up being an issue. Especially since destructibles only really heal you sometimes, and if they heal you at all, it is for a small amount.

Now, if there was some sort of meta-progression to make you feel like you were getting stronger on each subsequent run, it might be less of an issue. However, there isn’t any type of meta-progress. Instead, you get upgrades during your run, which you lose upon death. However, if you don’t get useful upgrades or don’t get far enough to get more, you’re just out of luck.

The controls are smooth, the visuals are nice, and even the music and sound effects sound good. However, the difficulty and the lack of polish involved in single-player make it a bit of a turnoff. If you can play with friends or are willing to tolerate the various issues that Zengeon has, you might enjoy it. Personally, I think there are far better Roguelikes out there on the market.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Zengeon was provided by PQube for this review.

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Zengeon

$19.99 USD

3

Score

3.0/10

Pros

• Great Visuals
• Smooth Controls
• Multiplayer Might be Fun

Cons

• Excessive Difficulty
• No Meta Progression
• Rough English Localization
• Clearly balanced Towards Multiplayer
• Poor Single-Player Polish