(Originally created 6-30-17)
What would it take for you to go into rebellion against your government?
For the people in Streets
of Rogue, a game developed by Matt Dabrowski for tinyBuild, the answer is,
apparently, “not much.” All the new Mayor had to do to get an underground
rebellion seeking his blood was to raise taxes, ban chicken nuggets because of
his allergies, and confiscate all the booze so he could hold a terrible party. Although
to be fair, that last one is totally worthy of capital punishment. That’s not
to say the rest of the town is perfect. The factories are an OSHA nightmare,
the police force is highly corrupt, and the park is filled with cannibalistic
hillbillies. As the newest member of the Resistance, it’s up to you, who or
whatever you are, to make your way through this crazy city and take out the
Mayor, causing a great deal of property damage all the while.
The main part of the gameplay takes place in a
procedurally generated city, with three levels per zone, for a total of nine as
of the current build. Each stage gives you two or three missions that must be
completed before you can enter an elevator to the next floor. These missions
include such tasks like neutralizing people, lethally or otherwise, freeing
slaves, or retrieving an item from a person or container. The missions don’t
have to end in success, but completing them give you items ranging from guns to
weird gadgets and drugs, including a pill that lets you live out your dreams of
impersonating the DC character Apache Chieftain by turning into a square-cube
law defying giant. The game has a similar feeling to the Grand Theft Auto games combined with Deus Ex due to the open stages plus the ability to solve problems
in a variety of ways.
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| Such as burning down a hedge maze instead of solving it. |
One of the main draws of the game is the large variety of
characters available, each offering unique abilities and playstyles. You have
some basic archetypes such as the slum dweller, who starts out weak but gets
more experience and can gain stat points when leveling up, the soldier, who
starts with military equipment and the ability to regenerate at low health, and
the hacker, a personal favorite of mine who can hack electronics from a
distance to cause a variety of effects, like making refrigerators run forward
at high speeds because puns. There are also some more unique characters that
offer unique challenges and abilities. Some good examples include the finance
banker, whose hard-partying lifestyle means he needs to take drugs frequently
in order to avoid deadly withdrawal symptoms, a hyper-intelligent gorilla, a
beefcake who can use a charged attack but can’t speak to humans or use guns,
and the shapeshifter, a small naked humanoid who can possess people to gain
their skills, stats, and inventory.
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| These gorillas have a simple and just mission: destroy anyone who still finds the Harambe meme funny. |
Between runs through the city, you have a home base area
where you can prepare for your next run. The NPCs in the base provide a variety
of services, which can generally be bought through chicken nuggets, which can
be earned by gaining experience levels or completing optional missions offered
by NPCs in the main game. The chicken nuggets you earn can be used to buy new
items or traits that can be obtained in future runs, or you can buy an item to
be added in your beginning inventory in your next run. There’s also the ability
to add ‘mutators’ to your run, which can alter how the game works by doing
things like making everyone aggressive toward you, impose a time limit for each
floor, or make the game a NRA member’s dream come true by giving everybody
rocket launchers. There are also plans to add a create-a-mutator feature in the
future, and there’s a recently added point-based character creation system.
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| The 2nd Amendment has officially gone too far. |
The game is surprisingly solid for an Early Access title
so far, with 94% of 1.1k reviews being positive, and I have to agree. The only
thing that sticks out to me as needing improving so far is that the AI can
sometimes be either too smart or too stupid. From the industrial section
onward, when some buildings have conveyor belts leading into fires, it’s not
uncommon to see goons stand on the belts and not care about the fact that
they’re being cooked well done, although they normally will avoid traps
normally while walking around. On the flip side, punching random citizens don’t
annoy the cops if the fight is nearby but out of sight. But if you punch an NPC,
alive or otherwise, nearby aligned NPCs who couldn’t see the action will become
suspicious and run to the fight, without possibly knowing this fight is
different. On a similar note cops will always go hostile if you burn down a
wooden building by using a flamethrower, even if it was on the opposite side of
town and the fire is just ashes now. It really makes it hard to please my inner
pyromaniac if I have to fear omniscient police officers.
So far, I’d say that Streets
of Rogue is shaping up to be one of the success stories of the Early Access
system. The game’s team has done a very good job so far of taking care of bugs
as they show up and giving new content at a steady pace. Hopefully it can keep
up this momentum as they finish working on the last two levels and the main
quest. I’m looking forward to seeing the full release.
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