Reading through Space Rogue’s summary and browsing through the game’s screenshots on Steam will send a wave of familiarity over you. It’s an early access game that gives you command of a ship and a sandbox of a galaxy to explore. In fact, it's very similar to another game called FTL.
Take on the role of a spaceship captain. Explore new worlds, and engage in intense ship-to-ship battles. Develop unique battle tactics, upgrade your ship, and recruit crew members as you fight for peace or piracy.
— Steam Developer Page
Now, I don’t want to spend my entire impression comparing Space Rogue to FTL, but considering the game is essentially nothing but a clone, it’ll be hard not to. The formula is identical except we get spruced up graphics while sacrificing the fun, unpredictable scenarios that made the game great. FTL’s world might have seemed unforgiving but it also seemed to screw over all in-game characters indiscriminately. Space Rogue’s world only seems to have it out for the player.
Let’s talk world building
The world consists of “overworld” maps of solar systems. Players travel around points of interest by simply clicking on them and when they arrive a dialogue box will pop up and prompt an action from the player. In my experience so far about 80% of every encounter resulted in a fight. The rest of the encounters were simply context leading up to a fight.Everything in this game is randomly generated. Even your mission goals change from game to game. Much like your typical roguelikes, every new play through will lead to a somewhat different experience.
Sometimes you’ll be asked to side with either a pirate in attacking a merchant or siding with the merchant to help defend it against the pirate. Other times you’ll be stopped by crazy human-hating robots that will ask you if you have any “enslaved” robots aboard your ship; of course you're in for a fight no matter what your answer is. I even had a scenario pop up where a missionary ship was trying to convert the locals on a planet, only to be driven away from hostility while I had to, again, choose a side or decide to simply fly away.
The problem with all of these decisions is that you’re always fighting, and if you’re not fighting you should be because you’ll literally never be rewarded for making any other decision.
Let’s talk combat
Combat feels like a watered down version of FTL. Your ship still has different compartments, but they come built into your ship and there is no customization to take part in. Your ship consists of the main computer room, the weapons room, life support, shields, teleporter, med bay, and the engine room.
Doors can’t be opened or closed and you can’t strategically cut off oxygen supply in one room while locking the doors to try and suffocate intruders. Hull breaches do occur; however, and you can be sure that fires break out just as often. In fact, sometimes fires occur just because a planet you happen to be orbiting has a modifier that increases the chance of random fires. Why? Just to screw you over.
Below your ship you’ve got your weapons and battle cartridges. Weapons react very similar to how they do in FTL. You’ve got rockets, weapons that deal kinetic damage, weapons that start fires, and beam weapons. Some weapons pierce through shields while some are just absorbed by them. You’ll have to find a good balance to really succeed, or just load up on rockets because they do massive damage and pierce through shields.
Combat is really kind of boring in this game because rockets feel so broken. So far the best strategy in the game consists of equipping rocket weapons and targeting the enemy’s weapon systems. As long as you keep pressure on that room they literally can’t retaliate and you just wear them down.
Battle cartridges are new and give players abilities on longer cooldowns. My favorite two to use allowed me to increase my damage by 60% for the next attack and the other resulted in all of my attacks dealing 150% extra damage to a targeted room for the next 5 seconds. Again, combined with rockets I was literally able to melt any ship within a minute.
Diving deeper into random encounters
The meat of the game is in the random encounters and there already seems to be a healthy amount of them cooked up. But like I said earlier, almost all of these encounters result in a fight. Sometimes you'll receive coordinates to complete a quest on a planet elsewhere, but you’re still being lead to another fight and the rewards aren’t really any different than what you might expect to receive anyway.
The other most common encounter was mining, and mining is just as bad as a fight. To start off, you have to pay credits in order to mine on a planet. If you decide to mine you send off some probes and you literally seem to have a 35% chance of wasting your money because some random technical issue happened and you lose your probes. The hilarious part is that you always seem to suffer hull damage in the process. Why losing a probe causes hull damage is completely beyond me, but it happens. A lot.
When you do successfully land a probe you get four chances to dig for minerals and there are different colored tiles that indicate what kind of chances you have of successfully drilling the tile. Unfortunately, even the best tile largely results in you finding useless stuff while anything worse pretty much always results in you losing credits, causing hull damage, immediately sending you back with nothing, or destroying all the titanium you might have drilled up.
It’s pretty infuriating because mining is pretty costly and titanium can only be found by mining or forking over 100 credits for one piece of titanium. Titanium is used for purchasing more battle cartridges and also upgrading your ship.
Let’s talk leveling and ship upgrades
Ship upgrades feel… okay. You get small stat boosts when you upgrade a ship's system to level two but you usually don't see any major benefits until you hit level three. For instance, unlocking a new weapon slot happens at level three, and that’s when you become super overpowered. Unlocking the second level shield hull should always be the first upgrade because it immediately gives you 33% more hitpoints, which is pretty insane.
I never felt compelled to upgrade anything other than my hull, weapons, and shields because everything else seems pointless and upgrading is expensive. It costs five titanium for the level two upgrade and ten for the level three, and as we went over earlier, titanium is hard and frustrating to come by.
Your crew members can also level up, but you have to pay credits for them to do so which felt unnecessary. There are three types of crew members: engineers, warriors, and captains. Captains are overpowered at everything, warriors fight well, and engineers repair things. Everyone is pretty good at everything, however. And unlike FTL, having engineers in certain rooms don’t level them or give you any added benefit. Classes don't matter all that much, though, and you could easily survive intruder fights with a full crew of engineers.
In fact, I survived battling through four star systems with just one engineer and my captain because none of the four army bases I visited had any crew members to recruit. Any time I was boarded all I had to do was put them in the med bay and watch them take everyone down. The crew balancing is just silly.
Is this a justifiable purchase?
The full price for FTL is $9.99, it’s currently on sale for $4.99, and it routinely goes on sale for that price or lower. Space Rogue is $29.99, full price, and currently on sale for $19.79. The amount of value you get from FTL is absolutely insane. It’s everything Space Rogue wants to be but isn’t.
I won’t go into the myriad of reasons why FTL is better, though. Space Rogue is in early access with a scheduled Q4 2015 release date. As of right now there isn't a lot of content, it only features one ship, and the incredibly repetitive "random" encounters only seem to exist to kill you. It’s not a fun experience right now and the price point is $20 higher than its main competitor.
There is a good foundation here, though, and maybe we'll see a turnaround by the time the developers release v1.0.
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