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Roguelike comparison

written 2026-07-08

I really like roguelikes. In this article I'm going to compare five I've played in detail on many aspects. The games are:

I'm ordering by similarity. Hellcard and Slay The Spire 2 are very similar both mechanically and thematically, Cobalt Core is another deckbuilder, Invisible, Inc. is another turn-based game, and Rabbit And Steel is an action game so it's the odd one out. (And I put Hellcard first because it's the first roguelike I played.)

I've also played Into The Breach, but I don't remember it well enough to analyze it. And I've briefly played The Void Rains Upon Her Heart, but I feel there isn't enough to say about it because it's minimalist in both its bullet hell and roguelike aspects. So those two won't be included in the comparison.

So, all these games can be divided into three parts:

I'll also be comparing them on five other traits:

These aren't necessarily the only aspects of a game worth caring about, but the first three are the biggest things with the most to say about them, and the last five are things that are important to me.

Quick quantification

Don't take this list too seriously, it's just a summary of my feelings before I compare them in detail.

Hellcard

Slay The Spire 2

Cobalt Core

Invisible, Inc.

Rabbit And Steel

Again, the above list is not a definitive measurement or ranking of quality. A game's enjoyability can't actually be described by a few numbers.

Combat

I scored Slay The Spire 2 lowest on combat because often it plays itself: play your block cards from best to worst until you have enough block, then play your attacks from best to worst. This is especially true in the first few fights of a run where most of your deck is just vanilla cards that give block or attack with no other effects or interactions.

Related: Slay The Spire 2 starts you with more of these cards than the other deckbuilders, and gives you fewer opportunities to remove them.

Hellcard's combat is much more interesting for several reasons: better card design; there's multiple enemies so you have to think about which to target; they're also positioned in 2D space and many cards hit everything in an area; and there are many ways to defend besides block: you can move monsters around to different zones which can interrupt their actions, or you can stun or freeze them.

Cobalt Core also has pretty interesting combat but differently. There's always just one enemy, and position is 1D, but there's many different ways to defend and unlike Hellcard, most of them are resources that persist across turns, so you have more options than just what's in your hand, and when you don't urgently need defense, it's worth thinking about stockpiling some ahead of time instead of attacking. The midrow is also a great mechanic: a space where either you or the enemy can deploy objects between your ships that can help or hinder you depending on how they're used.

Invisible, Inc. is the winner on turn-based combat. It's about positioning multiple units, which easily leads to a lot of depth (see Chess). Beyond that, it constantly presents strategic choices that don't have obvious right answers, like going for bonus objectives or not, choosing enemy devices to hack or conserve power, and every enemy can be dealt with in multiple ways, and it's really difficult to decide.

Rabbit And Steel also has great combat, but it's the only action game, so it's not very meaningful to compare to the others.

Flow of battle and thoughts on balance

In Hellcard, most fights have many enemies, so their damage goes down over time as you kill them, and short-term things are good. Permanent buffs *can* be good, but you shouldn't have more than two because fights will be almost over by the time you get them all into play. Sadly this means the last few turns of battle are often just a formality, killing the last few monsters that have no chance of hurting you alone.

In Slay The Spire 2, it's the opposite, most fights are against one enemy and they last several turns, and the most dangerous fights are the bosses which are even longer, so having several permanent buffs in your deck is really good. But most enemies get stronger over time, so you do need to focus on doing damage, not just surviving.

Cobalt Core is different from both. Most enemies don't scale over time, so defensive sustainability is good to aim for.

Invisible, Inc. is very different from the others because the goal of each mission isn't to kill enemy, it's to find and loot some objective and then escape. But levels are also filled with other, less valuable lootables, and you want to loot as much of it as you can before you leave, but the enemy forces also get stronger over time, so you want to be quick about it and if it gets too dangerous, leave some behind.

Rabbit And Steel doesn't have much flow-of-battle dynamics. Enemies don't scale over time, and neither do players, but there are time limits on high difficulties, so you need to keep your damage-per-time over a certain amount. As long as you're over that amount, defensive items are pretty good.

Building

The quality spread of these games is much smaller on building. They're all pretty good, but if I have to pick a loser it's Hellcard, because of its poor card balance. This often trivializes what should be interesting choices because one of the options is blatantly overpowered, and though in theory each class has many different builds they can go for, many aren't really viable.

But, you get a lot of choices other than which cards to add. Inbetween each battle you also get various options like removing cards, upgrading cards, or getting artifacts (passive buffs that don't need to be drawn). And each of these actions costs gemstones, and you can spend more gemstones to get better versions of them. For example, at the place that lets you remove cards, you can spend 1 to remove a card it picks for you (but it says which it'll be), or spend 2 to remove a card of your choice, or spend 3 to remove two cards.

Disclaimer: it's been a long time since I played Hellcard, so its balance might have improved.

Rabbit And Steel is also relatively poor just because of the low number of choices. You get 6 treasure spheres and 4 shops, so only 10 decision points per run. But you can usually afford multiple things in shops, and the multiplayer makes treasure spheres more interesting because multiple players can't pick the same item, so you have to think about not only how good each one is for you, but who can best use each one.

Slay The Spire 2 has much better card balance than Hellcard, so choosing whether and which to add to your deck is much more interesting. It doesn't have nearly as many choices other than adding cards, but random events offer interesting ones.

In Cobalt Core you almost never want card rewards, even less often than the other deckbuilders, but choosing which ones to upgrade can be quite interesting. But choosing which to remove is not so interesting, because the starters have a clear hierarchy. You always want to remove your Basic Shots first, then Basic Blocks, then Basic Dodges.

Invisible, Inc. wins again on building. It has a lot of different ways to upgrade your agents. You can find new weapons and consumables on missions, spend credits at a nanofabricator to get specific ones, or spend credits inbetween missions to increase your agents' stats. And most of these options are pretty well balanced. You can also move items between agents, and deciding who should have what is also interesting.

Card upgrade system

Hellcard has the most sophisticated upgrade system of the three deckbuilders. Slay The Spire 2 has the least, where each card only has one upgrade which is always a strict upgrade, Cobalt Core has 2 upgrade options per card, and Hellcard has an entire upgrade *tree* organized in three tiers where each card can upgrade into 3 others one tier higher. And some of these options are strict upgrades, but others completely change it, which adds an interesting aspect to deckbuilding: you sometimes want to take a card not because it's good now, but because of what it can upgrade into.

Sadly, this 3-tier upgrade system, combined with the fact that card rewards can contain options from different tiers, hurts the building aspects of Hellcard because a high-tier card is usually so much stronger than a low-tier card that you want it even if it doesn't synergize with your deck.

Flow of building and thoughts on balance

Hellcard, Slay The Spire 2, and Rabbit And Steel all encourage specialization, building your whole deck/character around one thing because the synergies are so strong (though Hellcard's tier system is a caveat to this if it offers you cards from different tiers). Whereas Cobalt Core encourages generalization, there aren't many overpowering combos, and each defensive resource you can get is better at dealing with different kinds of attacks so it's good to have some of everything.

Invisible, Inc. also encourages generalization. There aren't many synergies at all, and many items are somewhat redundant if multiple agents have them.

Routing

I gave Rabbit And Steel 0 points for routing because it has no routing choices, no journey map. Which areas you visit in which order is random.

Cobalt Core does have a journey map with routing choices, but it's so badly balanced that it adds almost nothing to the game. The map node have a strict hierarchy: repair yard -> artifact -> random event -> elite -> normal enemy. You always want to prioritize them in this order.

Slay The Spire 2 is slightly better balanced. There are two top-tier nodes: shops and rest sites. And elites are actually quite dangerous, so you don't always want to pick them over normal fights. But I'm still always looking for the route that gets me the most shops or rest sites, and not really looking at what else is in the way.

Hellcard is better still. The map is simpler: instead of branching paths, each floor just has an independent choice of two locations that you'll get to access after the battle there, but there are many more different locations, there are two top-tier ones and more middle tiers. And you can also see which enemy type will be in each one, so you can choose based on that as well as the location. It's also made more interesting by its multiplayer, since each player has a different map and after each floor, you'll have access to the locations chosen by *all* players. So it's good to have different players go to different ones.

Invisible Inc. is the clear winner on routing. There are 8 different types of missions that are all reasonably balanced! You can also see which corporation you'd be up against on each one, and each corporation has different security measures which you might be better or worse equipped for. The map distance mechanic also deepens it (each mission costs different amounts of the time you have before the final mission, depending on how far it is on the map from your previous mission).

Fairness

Hellcard has the most luck. As a card game, you can get screwed over by drawing your cards at the wrong times, and on high difficulty, you can die from full health in one turn if you have a bad draw. There's also much luck with the actions inbetween fights. There's even one where you can gamble gemstones, and it's balanced to encourage it.

Slay The Spire 2 also has much luck, but you have much more health relative to enemy damage which at least mitigates the harm of in-battle luck, since one bad draw never gets you killed from full health. Better card balance mitigates out-of-battle luck, since you're less likely to be offered very overpowered things, or to be offered only useless garbage. But on the other hand it has random events which have much luck, since they can be surprise battles or even outright force you to add bad cards to your deck. Also, the journey map doesn't show what enemy is in each room, and different enemies hard-counter different builds, so you can easily lose a run if you chance into the wrong one.

Cobalt Core has less still. It's still a card game and you can get screwed over by bad draws, but because you can store defensive resources across turns, one bad draw rarely leads to unavoidable damage. Random events also have less luck, since they're almost always good and/or offer you the option to refuse them.

Invisible, Inc. doesn't have much randomness during missions. They do have randomly generated layouts that you have to explore, though. You might get lucky and find your main objective and the exit immediately, or they might be the last things you find. Enemy movements can be more or less favorable, but you almost always have a chance to see them coming and plan for them.

Rabbit And Steel, being an action game, definitely has the least luck. It still has quite a bit - treasure spheres can offer you very powerful synergies or useless junk - but you can always avoid damage by playing well.

Run configuration

Slay The Spire 2 has 5 characters to play as that all have unique mechanics and completely separate card pools, but that's the only variable.

Rabbit And Steel has 14 characters but again it's the only variable.

Hellcard has 4 characters (+1 with DLC), but it also lets you trade your starting gems for starting artifacts, which is multiple independent variables.

And it has by far the most interesting difficulty settings. It has a set of "torments", which you can select any combination of, and each is worth 1-3 difficulty points. This is great not just because it gives you a lot of different ways to play (you can have two very different settings that are both "torment 10"), but also because it adds strategy: say you want to win on torment 10, which torments should you take? Anemic (increases enemy health) and Sickly (increases enemy damage) are extra dangerous if combined, so you might want one of those but not both. If you take too many that hinder deckbuilding, you might not be able to get a good enough build in time for the final boss, but if you take too many that hinder combat, you might not survive the early floors.

There are many thousand possible combinations of torments for 10 points, and tens of thousands for 20 points, though in practice it's a bit less because some torments are poorly balanced and do almost nothing so you always want them, and some combinations are obviously terrible ideas.

This gets even more interesting in multiplayer, where you can pick different ones to support each other. For example, maybe someone takes Pacifist (which punishes you every time you get the killing blow on a monster), so the others should NOT take Pacifist. Maybe someone takes Anemic and someone else takes Sickly. Maybe someone takes a bunch of deckbuilding torments so they can carry the early floors and someone else takes a bunch of combat torments so they can carry the late floors, or maybe both take a little of each.

Invisible, Inc. lets you pick 2 agents out of 10 (+4 with DLC) to start with, and 2 programs out of 5 (+1 with DLC) (separate options per program slot). That's 1125 configurations without DLC and 3276 with! And these variables affect the game more than Hellcard torments, although not as much as the characters in the others.

Cobalt Core lets you pick one of 5 ships to pilot, each of which has unique mechanics, and 3 of 8 characters to crew it, which each have their own cards. That's 280 different configurations, which might not sound impressive next to the thousands I was just talking about, but these all lead to very fresh experiences and playstyles! Each character and ship is so unique and cool that I actually consider Cobalt Core the winner on run configuration.

Multiplayer

Slay The Spire 2's multiplayer seems bolted on to a singleplayer game; it just multiplies enemy health by the number of players, all enemy attacks hit all players, and there are very few ways for players to interact with each other. For example, most cards that give block can't be played on allies. Multiplayer is still enjoyable, but it does a bad job of being multiplayer.

Hellcard is much more designed around multiplayer. Lots of its cards only make sense in or are balanced around it. For example, the Mage's starting block cards give 1 to all players, the Warrior's give 2 to any player, and the Rogue's give 2 only to themself.

But this doesn't necessarily make Hellcard better than Slay The Spire 2, since it means Hellcard is very poorly designed for singleplayer. It lets you play with partly computer-controlled allies in singleplayer to mitigate this, but that's not as satisfying as a game properly designed for it.

Rabbit And Steel also does a great job designing for multiplayer, but unlike Hellcard, its singleplayer experience suffers very little for it. There are a few items that are poorly balanced in singleplayer, but not as many and not as drastically, and all the enemy attacks that require cooperation are replaced with attacks designed for singleplayer. The dev really went the extra mile here, making multiple versions of every enemy.

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