Roar of Revenge Review

Roar of Revenge tells the story of Keel the Barbarian who’s on a mission to go head to head with a villainous, powerful man-lion called Leomhann in order to stop his path of fury and destruction. On his way to take on the powerful villain, Keel will face a vast bestiary of foes.

Roar of Revenge is a 2D platformer that feels directly out of the 8-bit era of gaming. First, you start off only with your trusty sword that can only attack in the direction you’re looking at i.e. you can’t do upward or downward attacks. You can thankfully kneel to kill smaller enemies. As you progress through the game, you’ll find additional skills that will help you on your quest as you conquer the game’s ten levels. Every level has a bonfire-like area where you can save your progress and refill your health (and later on, your magic).

Yes. At first, you cannot even jump, but thankfully it’s the first skill that you acquire when you find the magical winged sandals. And for example, another skill is finding Zeus’ bracelet. At first, they are literally useless, but once you unlock the magic meter by finding a blue pouch, you can use it to fire blue balls at enemies that cause a decent amount of damage.

The game has two annoying flaws. The first being every time you get hit, the whole screen will flash white. It’s quite jarring even after a few deaths and can’t imagine this is a fun thing for people susceptible to seizures. And the screen will also flash inexplicably throughout certain levels; for example in level 2, spiked balls will drop on the ground, and every time it breaks the ground, the screen flashes. Like why? How did this get through QA? Additionally, the lack of reasonable checkpoints. Yes, there are bonfires you can save and regain health at, but on some levels, there are far and few between and death means you’re back at the start of the level.

Roar of Revenge’s pixelated style would’ve made a great game during the NES and even Sega Master System era. While the overall color tone of the game tends to border on the darker side of things, there’s a decent variety of uniqueness in terms of environments. Although there are some areas where it’s easy to confuse enemies with the background and get some unfair damage. The soundtrack is a pretty decent affair; surprisingly better than expected, albeit still quite forgettable. Seems no one can replicate classic chiptune scores from the 8-bit era of gaming.

Roar of Revenge is a mediocre, quite frustrating 2D action platformer. There’s nothing special here, but the lack of checkpoints aside from specific bonfires because there’s nothing more frustrating than dying at the end of a level because you didn’t have time to react. Also, the flashing/flickering (which personally caused me a few headaches) is incredibly annoying. If you can tolerate these major flaws, Roar of Revenge is a pretty mediocre experience that drags too long and feels even longer due to unfair deaths.