Deadzone: Rogue Review

Deadzone: Rogue is a roguelite FPS developed and published by Prophecy Games. I did a preview for this game a couple of months back and enjoyed it well enough, but now that it’s fully released, it’s time to take a closer look and see if it was worth the wait.

The story begins with you waking up on the ISS-X spaceship with nothing but a pistol in your hand, not even your memories. The only other occupants are hostile robots and twisted creatures who are hellbent on ending you… and succeeding. However, when you die, you wake up back where you started. With no other choice, you’ll need to fight and loot your way through the ship to find out what happened, recover your lost memories, and solve this mess before something else ensures your next death is a permanent one.

I found the story to be pretty good for what it is. It’s not winning awards, but I was interested enough to take a look at all the text logs and listen to the dialogue, even though most of it will be from your gruff-sounding player character who doesn’t speak in anything other than deadpan. I got used to his flat voice, and eventually enjoyed it when he made sarcastic quips or comments on the horrible things happening on the ship. Also, I have the feeling the developer doesn’t like Elon Musk.

As for the graphics, it’s fine, but it is pretty samey for the most part. There isn’t much randomisation to rooms, only the order and what types of enemies you encounter in there, but it at least looks nice and all the areas have a story to tell, either through the environment or from some of the scattered text logs from the dead. The music is pretty good too and worth a listen.

But enough about that, let’s get into the gameplay. In a normal run, every room starts with you in Stealth Mode, allowing you to study your enemies before you start a gunfight. Finding a good position, identifying big threats, and planning your attack is a pretty big aspect that I often don’t run into when playing these types of games. I just checked out a similar title, VOID/BREAKER, and it just expects you to go in guns blazing. At least here, you can always begin your fights with an ambush.

Although you start with only a common pistol, plain grenades, and the ability to dash, you’ll soon find yourself with much more than that. For weaponry, you’ll have access to knives, axes, lances, different pistols, SMGs, shotguns, miniguns, every variety of rifle you can think of, and a few gimmicky blasters. You’ll be spoilt for choice on what guns you can use, and they all feel great in my personal opinion.

You might need to adapt to a few weapons with strange effects, but I found all of them to be effective and powerful… except for the Ion Driver, which is a charge shot weapon but only when aiming down sights. I could never really get my head around it. However, despite the variety, I did find myself sticking to mostly assault rifles and the occasional SMG if I did have a choice.

Ranging from Common to Legendary, the rarer the gun, the more powerful it is, adding elemental damage, status effects, and passive buffs. At Safe Rooms, you can spend scrap to level up your equipment, upgrade its rarity, or re-roll its modifiers. However, all equipment has a limit on how much it can improve, so eventually, you will need to replace it with something with more potential. It’s nice to be able to stick with what you like, but it does force you to change if you aren’t lucky enough to find a replacement. It at least doesn’t make you stare at stats and sort through all your loot, just pick up whatever has a green arrow on it; it’s quick and easy to do.

Along with all the guns that drop from enemies, you’ll be rewarded with Augments, Perks, and Items after beating rooms, as well as Superior Items at Safe Rooms. Augments have powerful bonuses that will change how you gun down your enemies, while Perks can boost your survivability or damage potential, and Items help refine your build with more passive buffs, with Superior Items doing the same but are also upgradable between runs. However, if you get the right combination of all the above, you’ll activate a Synergy that provides a special ability and sort of breaks the game if you have enough of them. There is a tangible difference with each buff obtained.

Once you get a real build going, you start to become a bullet-spewing demigod who can wipe the floor with even the most bullet-spongey of enemies. I got to a point where I didn’t care about how much damage I took, even when I was surviving with only 1 HP, as enemies dropped enough Health Orbs to refill it back to full.

Of course, power like this is fleeting. Dying or beating the mission will send you back to your ship, sans all the guns, armour, and buffs you collected. However, this is also the place where you can upgrade your stats and Superior Items (via spending Tech Points and Components found throughout your previous attempt), change your weapon skins (or character skin if you have the Operative Pack DLC), check in on Planty the Plant, and change your mission before you run to the elevator to get yourself killed again… or win, but most likely killed. It’s a nice place to see after all the horrors, but I really wish I could skip the whole waking-up sequence or retry a mission from the menu.

Now, to finish the game and see the ending, you only need to beat the three zones, which makes for a very short playthrough (even with all the deaths). However, Deadzone: Rogue offers a variety of speciality challenges and endless modes which will unlock new guns, perks, and skins, so they’re very much worth doing. I enjoyed the optional content and it made me appreciate weapons and augments I’d usually skip over.

If you think you're having too much of an easy time, you can adjust the difficulty of a mission; the harder it is, the better the rewards you get. If that’s not enough, you and two other friends can also shoot your way through the ship. I didn’t have the opportunity to test it out myself, though, so I personally don’t know how good the connection is, but I’ve been informed that it’s done well and you shouldn’t have many issues playing with others.

As for performance, it runs amazingly despite all the chaos that tends to happen in the later levels. The load times were quick, there were no frame drops during gameplay, but I did notice one or two issues.

I found myself getting stuck on objects and this often resulted in a somewhat unfair death. If that wasn't bad enough, there were times when the game just didn't respond to my button presses. There is nothing wrong with my controller, as I could do other things like interact and back out of menus, but it just refused to let me do the same actions that are mapped to it, such as crouch and swap weapons. There was a Synergy that does auto-swap your weapons, but I hadn’t unlocked Synergies at that point in the game. There was one instance of using the wrong subtitles and I also saw there might be an issue with saves, so be warned.

Deadzone: Rogue was worth the wait. It has an addictive gameplay loop that will keep you coming back even after you die again and again, and there’s always something new to upgrade or check out with every attempt. Even by yourself, you’ll find hours upon hours of high-octane action.