Belated hootemer: Starward Rogue

You ever get an idea of what a game is, and wanting that game, in your head? And then when you get said game, you realize you either had it wrong or were thinking of an entirely different title? And you're left in the possession of a game you're now trying to figure out if you even wanted? Well, here's Starward Rogue, and here's me.

Starward Rogue is an "Arcen title". If you've never heard of Arcen, they make a lot of weird games. That's sort of their thing. They're probably one of the most prolific indie developers. On a basic level I admit I feel affection toward Arcen, they try to do something different and keep trying. Some of their games are successes and some aren't, but that just makes them more endearing.

Which kinda makes Starward Rogue a little weird to review. Starward isn't an especially creative or unusual venture, and how I mixed it up with something else is very strange to me. In fact this game is almost a little ironic to review now, but it's just coincidentally a title that appeared in a humble monthly - albeit a humble monthly I didn't pay for, and instead got from a friend - which it has in bundle common with some other games I've been playing.

Anyway, the game is a completely top down roguelite or maybe even roguelike twin stick shooter. I'd say it is "simple" but the game manages to be extremely complex in spite of the fact it's a simple premise and it all kinda rolls from there. I'm putting it under shootember because bullets and shooting, man, bullets covering the screen.

Arcen style yo



The game is primarily about interfacing with shmup elements alongside roguelite elements, but more in the latter category than nuclear throne, which I coincidentally just reviewed as well. You play a hydra - yes, the mythical beast - who divided off one of his heads to pilot a mech. And then does so again, after you die. Your mission is to something something and you descend through the MEGALITH, a massive structure built out of a star.

The game doesn't pull any punches when trying to set up a cool setting. Anyway you go room to room purging enemies and then looting for what scrap you can find. As with Nuclear Throne, you have to clear all enemies to progress, though in this game's case it is generally in smaller rooms with less enemies but spread over larger floors. Rooms can also contain mini-bosses and you need to expunge the boss of each floor to progress. There's also a wide assortment of loot rooms, secret rooms, and sometimes rooms with nothing in them at all. It's a top down room to room mech shmup or something.

Gameplay should be very simple but adds a lot of fiddly complexity. You have your main gun, your secondary fire, missiles and an on-use item slot. The first you can fire endlessly, the second you have an 'energy meter' that refills with each room, the third you resupply and the fourth is a one-shot you have to find. Also those are pickups and they do different things. Your secondary fire usually gives you, like, two or three shots per room and...

Also missiles clear bullets, but not a lot of them, and you need them to bust through bombable blocks, so you're often pretty low on them.Bombable blocks open the secret rooms, fwiw, so they're important. I'm not going to lie: I really dislike basically all of this system. You end up with a lot of skills you just blow early to keep you from forgetting, and all of it just feels like it quickly winnows down to just having your primary attack since everything is drawn in different directions. So it's complexity that generally offers a certain jank to the game. Honestly, I find the game more enjoyable when I'm not expected to use the energy bar and instead just focus on using two avenues of assault instead of four. The fact the energy bar doesn't regenerate at all within rooms makes it feel very silly on bosses.

You can also switch... All of this stuff, it feels like. I've changed weapons of both primary and secondary slot, and I think you can change which missiles you fire as well, but I haven't found that. There's also tons of upgrades and modules and stuff that changes your numbers around. It's a very good roguelike in that manner. Don't get me wrong, there's lots of options and doodads and stuff to change around. I just don't like how a lot of it feels a little too 'oh shit' and not trying to get into a rhythm.

Enemies come with a ton of variety, but the screen rapidly fills with bullets and you end up with very little in the way of visual aesthetic actually coming through most of the time. Enemy design is... Frankly, it's bad. It's not always bad, but a lot of enemies spam stuff you can't outrange, so you spend a lot of time standing there or dodging around. It just ends up dragging out a lot of the fights and I find myself bored with the game a lot more than I'd like to. This is especially bad since it feels like the effective dps uptime you need on the enemies increases far faster than your damage upgrades, so as the floors progress it starts to get quite tedious. Sometimes your damage upgrades go really well and everything just explodes... Which is also sort of not great?

Boss enemies, on the other hand, are all a treat. Or at least mostly, some of them I don't think I got the patterns down, but usually they're pretty cool to do. Mini-bosses as well are more intense and focused, with some really brutal action that has you dodging around the screen while trying to keep fire on them. It just feels like the design of the enemies doesn't match up with the design of the bosses. I have no idea why trash mobs need to feel like a slog while bosses are intense pattern dodging action.

It's a minor quibble as well, but you drive a 'mech'. It is well animated and I quite like it, the legs pump, the chassis spins, the gun fires. It's nice. All the enemies are floating blobs with very little detail put in. Even the bosses are just... Not really much of anything. You're basically shooting windows 7 icons. I'm not saying the game direly needed a massive amount of visual work, but a couple more animations like the mech would add something to the game. The backgrounds have floating debris and stuff, which looks cool, but the foreground is rather static.

The music is good but there aren't enough tracks. You've heard all of it by the time you've finished a run. Speaking of which, I only ever finished one run in this game - which is to say beat the boss once - because my second run that was going good ended quite abruptly in getting stuck in a wall. That soured me enough on the game it shifted from playable to 'uggghh' and I just stopped.

So what's my analysis here? I like Starward Rogue, though I regret getting it off my friend, since I think it's actually more a game for him than a game for me. It's decent, not great, although I don't think the genre really works that well for me. If you're into this genre, I think it'll do you alright, but if you're not I'd give it a gentle pass. I certainly had some fun with it, but it's just kind of a mess at times.