I often review roguelites and rogue-likes, and many of the titles I pick up and play on my own for fun also fall into the roguelite genre. Roulette Hero aims to combine roguelite elements with the random chance of roulette, straight out of a casino and onto your screen.
It is a game that really wants to combine the random number generator (RNG) addictiveness of Balatro with a cute and critter-filled experience where players pull a lever to spin a wheel and beat their way through a series of opposing robots.
With Roulette Hero, you’re not going to be blown away by its story, but you’re definitely going to get hooked by its addictive gameplay loop.
Plot Ahoy!
Roulette Hero is a pretty simple adventure without much story. You’re a robot in a factory, and you’re trying to use animals and other things around you to beat the other robots. Playing each level is pretty simple. You pull the lever and a cursor will roll around the screen like a slot machine, and whatever tile the cursor lands on will do its effect. You’ll earn gold from the abilities of your tiles or from beating bosses, and you can spend that gold to buy tiles from the shop or to spin the wheel an additional time at the expense of your gold reserves. You can also refresh the shop if you’re looking for a specific kind of tile to finish a strategy.
Typically, if the cursor lands on one of your animal tiles, that animal will attack the boss, and defeating the boss lets you move on to the next stage. Some of the creature tiles have wackier effects, of course, as some will eat their neighboring tiles when landed on, while others may straight up die to create another more powerful animal.
There’s actually a lot going on in Roulette Hero, which is what makes starting a new run so much fun. Your chosen character has its own ability, and the handle for the slot machine has its own specialization which changes what kind of builds you’ll ultimately aim for. While you play, you’ll gain augmentation points and cartridges that can completely change up your strategy. With whatever difficulty you’ve chosen to try, you’ll play through multiple opponents until you reach the final boss, who generally requires that you have some form of wacky synergy going on in order to cut through their hundreds or possibly thousands of health points.
Review Notes
The game’s difficulty starts off easy, but each additional difficulty level adds a stacking modifier that can make Roulette Hero considerably more challenging. You obtain a lot more variety as you win in Roulette Hero, and you have to be a lot more flexible in trying to achieve various synergies as you unlock more and more cards and species of animals to fight for you. As you play more, you’ll unlock additional animal types which means re-rolling the shop will be a lot more attractive. At the start you can easily build up something powerful that will slaughter bosses by relying on cats and dogs, but you’ll eventually have insects, snakes, mollusks, and all different sorts of creatures that can help you take on the robot masters that are in your way.
As you progress through further stages of the adventure, costs will increase and boss HP will go up considerably, so the need to assemble a build that’s worthwhile will become more and more important as you conquer stages. What the animals do can be heavily variable too, but you’re going to trip over some powerful synergy more often than not because the critters you can place on the board have a wide variety of abilities and so long as you’re not picking at random, you should be able to make good headway. It’s very rewarding to come up with a combo of tiles that is so powerful it just obliterates the last few bosses you have to clear for a win. If you do wind up losing, you can click restart to begin from the boss you just lost to, rather than having to completely redo everything from the beginning.
There are quite the number of viable builds you can aim for while you tackle all of the different levels of Roulette Hero. Since you’re regularly earning coins, there’s a nice balance you have to strike between buying new critters from the shop and spending coins to pull the lever multiple times per turn.
You’ll regularly have gold flowing in and out as you blow up every robot that dares stand in your way in Roulette Hero. Sometimes you may have a build where your legion of cats absolutely slaughter anything that stands against you, while in another instance, you might need to keep feeding a shark or praying mantis because their damage increases every time they can eat an adjacent tile, and that’s the only way you’re going to chew through a boss’s thousands of hit points.
After clearing difficulty level eight, you’ll unlock the all-map challenge mode to really test out the longevity of whatever builds you’ve come up with to enjoy in Roulette Hero. There are 20 difficulties in total, and each one adds a stacking modifier similar to the chip difficulty levels in Balatro. I don’t recall unlocking anything new after difficulty 10, but there is definitely a good amount here to keep you busy for hours on end if the gameplay loop sinks its hooks into you. Even better: Roulette Hero is fully playable on the Steam Deck, with the touch screen and track pads being especially useful for dragging and placing new tiles while lying on the couch.
TLDR
If you enjoyed titles like Luck Be a Landlord or Slay the Spire, Roulette Hero will very likely be right up your alley since it’s a roguelite deck-builder where you’re constantly earning new unlocks and building toward powerful synergies to take down the hardest bosses. The difficulty curve is great. It starts off easy but gradually ramps up the challenge until it reaches the all-maps mode that really tests players’ game knowledge and luck. The visuals and music are simple, but what’s present is Roulette Hero’s purely addictive gameplay distilled into an adorable form by a vengeful robot. And really, what else could you ask for?