While 2019 was filled with mobile ports of fantastic games from other platforms, Cellar Door Games did us one better when they brought their beloved roguelike platformer Rogue Legacy ($3.99) to iOS in August of last year. Not only did it feature all of the content that had been released thus far in the versions of the game on other platforms, but it also included a respectable dose of brand new content that was exclusive to the iOS “Wanderer Edition" of the game. That included 30 brand new rooms, a couple of new mini-bosses, new armor sets, new traits, and more. Pretty impressive considering I would have been plenty happy with just a straight port. Cellar Door also rebalanced the whole game to trend towards being a bit easier, seeing as you’d likely be playing it with touch controls much of the time and possibly in non-optimal situations like while riding on a moving bus. It’s still sufficiently challenging and retains that oh-so-addicting progression system that the game is known for, and we had no problems giving Rogue Legacy: Wanderer Edition 5 stars in our review and picking it as our Game of the Week.
However, one complaint from players that I did see quite often was that Rogue Legacy for iOS would really heat up their device. Now, Rogue Legacy is a game from 2013 and while it’s certainly lovely looking there’s nothing that screams “graphically demanding" about its visuals, and at least on the surface it doesn’t seem like a game that would be taxing to any mobile hardware of the past several years. But you can’t judge a game’s performance by its cover, and sometimes even the simplest looking games require some pretty heavy hardware. In the case of Rogue Legacy, its use of OpenGL ES for its rendering seemed to be the resource hog culprit, and so Cellar Door went and rewrote the game to use Apple’s Metal API instead. According to the update notes, “This should significantly improve device efficiency, saving battery life and reducing the risk of overheating, especially on older devices!" So hey, if device heat issues were keeping you from enjoying this fan-freaking-tastic game on iOS, go grab today’s update to see if it takes care of that problem for you.
