Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion – PS5 Review

Roguematch : The Extraplanar Invasion is a roguelike match 3 puzzler from Starstruck Games. Unlike the likes of, say, Gems Of War, Puzzle Quest or our own personal favourite Grindstone, you also get to control your character, being a cute animal. Roguematch is animal themed into the bargain, with your first playable character being a cute bunny. Their special attack is a handy jump.

Controlling your character is key as the enemies also move around the arenas. It’s a nice change from the usual formula.  You can attack them, but more usually you are looking to evade their attacks. If you’re quick in some rooms, you can clear the goals without enemies even being part of the equation.

The schtick is your companions have ventured forth into the magical castle, only to be lost in the process. It’s down to you to retrieve them in turn. The first you’ll find is the nekomancer, yes, a feline necromancer. You’ve also got a paladin(u), who’s a shiba inu.

The core gameplay loop is go into room, solve the match three stage, rinse and repeat. The enemies and environmental hazards are the main barrier to progress, some being outright impossible to evade. Especially with the nekomancer’s limited moveset. You’ll find yourself surrounded by enemies on more than one occasion. At least the aforementioned bunny jump lets you get out of the stickier situation.

You generally have a few criteria to fulfil to clear a stage. Be it a set number of colour matches to bring down a counter or a match next to a coloured orb. Or kill all the enemies in the room. It all makes sense when you get down to it anyway.

The gameplay is addictive as hell with the room-based gameplay loop bringing to mind the like of any number of roguelikes, The Binding of Isaac in particular.  But just like Edmund McMillen’s 2011 effort, you’ll soon find yourself coming up short.

Bosses aren’t the barrier you might imagine, more the denizens of the rooms. Barring the electric turtle boss anyway. He’s a prick unless you get lucky with a particular item pickup. Like any number of roguelikes before it, you’ll start out with the best of intentions but soon realise you’re on a hiding to nothing. Especially once you’re into the second chapter.

The first chapter introduces the shifting swapping nature of the dungeon and rewards you with a new class, the nekomancer as mentioned. As you play, you’ll unlock consumables, those from the bunny class being summonable little cats and those from the cat being haste potions, replicating the respective base abilities of the first two classes.

We’d have gone with what other classes unlock too, but Roguematch pulls a bait and switch, the likes of which we’ve not seen since the 360 days when a beat-em-up we’d bought turned out to be borderline impossible. We forget the name, but we took advantage of Game’s now-defunct ten day returns policy for the first time in a long while.

In the case of Roguematch, you’ll have completed multiple successful runs, only to find yourself facing a new level. This is after having beaten all the bosses available until that point. Then you get a new gauntlet which is all well and good, but one particular enemy there is sure to be your undoing. The option to retry a level would be really useful, but no. We got lucky with the RNG once and were able to counteract their cheap as hell ability, but no we still succumbed.

You see, your matches fuel your ability to use your items, with certain items having pre-requisites. One sword is particularly useful as it has the passive ability of adding purple gems to your counter. You can add mana via conventional matches too, but you won’t get enough for most applications. Certainly not enough to go deep into a run.

You can access your inventory and jettison items where necessary, handily adding their abilities to your spells so you can reassign them to items you find that have space. Additionally, when you’re between floors in the dungeon, you can pick up items left behind, though this is a bit inconsistent. We’d assume that you can take an item if you have the inventory space available, but it doesn’t seem to work that way.

You can dispatch enemies via melee, or more generally by exploiting their weaknesses to a certain mana colour. Chain reactions often happen, so it’s generally worth taking a lesser match as it’ll sometimes lead to a decent outcome.

Roguematch: The Extraplanar Invasion  is really addictive, but ultimately frustrating, mainly due to the roadblock that is the boss at the end of chapter two. It’s horrible. It speaks volumes that at the time of writing, on the trophy tracking website we use, only five people have beaten it. Ourselves included as of today.  Sods law being in full operation, we’d as good as given up, only to have a successful run.

We unlocked another two classes, including the aforementioned paladin, though we’ve not yet managed to work out the optimum approach to use them to the best of our ability.

In conclusion, Roguematch is a good twist on the match three formula, adding the dungeon crawling aspect into the mix. Some mechanics are a little on the obtuse side, especially with regard to item retrieval that you’ve missed, but overall we liked it. Yes, the second chapter difficulty spike is horrible but we’re still playing despite that. So it’s good but frustrating.