izigame.me

This game handles very smoothly, moreso even than its predecessor. That might be why people are really loving it: they needed a smooth handling platformer in their lives.
The rest of the game is an overengineered trashpile of extraneous features that get in the way of enjoying the game.
As an aside before I get into this, I played, enjoyed, and got the True Ending in the first Rogue Legacy. This one barely merited finishing a first playthrough in my opinion.
Several mechanics in this game lend to what was overall a bad experience.
-The first is collision damage. Every enemy deals something close to its full attack damage on collision. Not inherently bad, but you'll see why this matters if you keep reading.
-Secondly, this game deserves the Bullet Hell tag. The amount of projectiles likely to be on the screen at any given time in this game is very high. Many projectiles pass through walls, some are homing, and some are both homing and pass through walls. Additionally, there are at least 3 different ways to deal with all these projectiles, creating a nigh unmanageable mess of every difficult encounter.
-The various and sundry currencies in this game feel incredibly unnecessary. Want an armor upgrade? Better have enough ore. Short on ore? Gotta find silver chests or kill a boss or invest in random drops from destroyable objects. Even then, one boss kill (the largest single source of ore) is about one gear piece's worth of ore. Want to upgrade the equipment recipes available? That costs soulstones. You can get some by doing the NPC dialogues to their completion, and bosses drop them in NG+, but other than that you'll have to complete scars, battle arenas with fixed loadouts that just aren't fun. They're actually overtuned to the point where the game has advantages you can grind out randomly in the dungeon to take the edge off them. It's essentially a grind on a grind on a grind. If you're playing this game with its stated objectives in mind, odds are you will never hit these resource demands while they're still relevant to your progress.
-Mechanics are incredibly obtuse. Armor is a prime example of this. On two different screens armor is described as subtracting from damage, and capping at 35% damage mitigation. A litter research turns up that this means that when you take damage, the game figures out which is higher between - and * .65 and that's how much damage you take. In and of itself that's not too bad but how do you tell if you have enough armor to hit the cap in the content you're doing? You can't.
-Class balance is just awful. There are 15 classes in this game and, because easily half the enemies use the strategy of rushing you to deal their collision damage, any class that has no range and no knockback operates at a horrible disadvantage. Likewise, the game is frequently very vertical, meaning any class with a bad aerial attack is at a severe disadvantage.
-Build options, at least in the first playthrough, are very underwhelming. Lifesteal runes are a good example of this. On playthrough one you can only have one of each rune via regular rune equipping. By equipping the Sanguine armor (at least 3 pieces to get the first tier bonus) you can get the benefit of two additional lifesteal runes. Lifesteal runes give you 1 + 4% of your strength score in healing when you kill an enemy. Additional runes raise the percentage by an additional 4%. By the end of the first playthrough you will have 50-60 Strength, so wearing the full sanguine bonus will net you approximately 7 HP per enemy killed. Your health pool is somewhere between 400-500 on most classes by this point in the game, and enemies will hit you for 60+ damage per hit if you have high armor. The Sanguine set, btw, has awful stats to make up for this percieved advantage. Perhaps this changes in the super-endgame NG+ content, but thoughout the first playthrough, meaningful loadout preparation was basically non-existent.
-Preparing to fight bosses is tedious if you want to leverage the advantages in the game. Each run your characters start at a baseline that's generally nowhere near adequate to beat the boss unless you've mapped its moves to the point that you won't get hit. To make a reasonably viable run at a boss, you're basically required to go stomp through previously unlocked areas and pick up relics and max health ups to create a viable build, which takes time. By the end of playthrough 1, expect to spend 30 mins to 1 hour per run just hunting down relics and health ups to make a decent go of the boss, otherwise you're likely to die so fast you don't learn much.
Overall this game is probably good for a sub-set of the rogue-lite fanbase, but I superlatively hated it. I really quite like the rogue-lite genre, but as much as I was looking forward to this title, it had the constant feel of a game designed to be frustrating, unrewarding, and intentionally bloated. Call me crazy, but by the end of a playthrough I like to feel more powerful and able, whereas this game constantly felt like jogging through sand to gain any ground at all.