After Jasmine and Gabe both pushed Deadzone: Rogue on me in the same weekend, and because it’s twenty five bucks, I crumbled quickly beneath this assault on heart and mind. There aren’t surprises on the surface; it’s gonna do exactly what it said it was gonna do. Then you fall into the loop. Part of that is getting a slightly better shoe, but… Here. Let me go into it.
It is a shooter roguelite. You pick up weapons and armor of increasing rarity, and select various items and improvements over the course of the run. It feels like Gunfire Reborn mixed with Deadlink, which should already inspire a purchase. But its shooting, from the perspective of “lineage,” is clearly drawn from Titanfall of all places. It’s just incredibly fast while remaining legible.
I like games of this kind, but these days I’m less likely to invest myself in one that doesn’t let me play with other people. Deadzone: Rogue allows three, which takes the regular build shenanigans you can get up to way into outer space. Synergizing three sets of abilities and talking over the choices is a huge part of the hang, and I can pull up anybody’s build in the Tab menu so I can make sure I’m building different elements without interrogating my team every ten seconds. Plus it has cross-play on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox from the jump which is shit hot. The way the game unfurls is through completing Missions that at various levels of difficulty, and then getting the associated rewards – except even at the start, it was already being done in a more interesting way than I expected. These missions were rewarding me with new Augments, which are early, run-defining buffs – and then they were constraining the gameplay with various run lengths, runs that focused on long or short range combat, and eventually adding entirely new elements to the pool. Much later on, it’s going to grant me new weapons with weird quirks. In the meantime, I would have liked it fine even if it were less smart about how it divvies up its riches.
It’s mean as fuck, too – you better be on your best behavior when you enter the lair of a cybernetic upside-down spider person. They don’t like it when you come in there. And he’s like twenty rooms in; it’s a real gut-check your first time out. You’re gonna think that this is gonna be just like the other inverted arachnoids you’ve encountered.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
(CW)TB out.