izigame.me

I'm of two minds on ROGUE FLIGHT and it's made me put off this review for a bit. Mostly to make sure I'm being as fair and honest as possible to both the game and the review-reader in kind. If you stick with me for a moment I'm going to approach this from both directions, but if you don't want to read my whole dissertation here, the short version is this:
ROGUE FLIGHT is both a very cool experience and, frankly, a mediocre game. In a world of experiences big and small, however, this is not one to outright avoid. For a certain type of person, I even recommend it. Like most things though, it's not for everyone, and in fact I feel like the audience that's enamored enough with the spectacle to overlook the shortcomings might be rather small. Read on if you want the details.
So first of all, let's talk about ROGUE FLIGHT as an experience.
ROGUE FLIGHT plays its hand right up front, this is something birthed from the minds of fans of any number late 80's/90's mecha anime. Most nearly, it's emulating something like a SDF Macross or Martian Successor Nadesico, but there are callbacks and subtle nods to even things like Evangelion. The plot itself is straight out of those first two, focusing mainly on a single super advanced spacecraft pitted against impossible odds, humanity on the brink, leveraging nothing but raw pluck and determination. Fully voiced (and very well-acted) cutscenes and mission dialogue set the somewhat familiar stage well.
The character & ship designs, the cutscenes, even the menus; all of it emulates that late 80's/early 90's era of anime & games. Speaking of the cutscenes, I often found myself impressed with the animation, camera angles, and framing, it was clear a lot of care went into them by someone with a keen artistic vision. As well, Nadia in particular leaves a great impression, she's got all the no-nonsense makings of a real mecha protagonist, I love her design and overall attitude.
Driven along by a beautiful, booming, rhythmic soundtrack of high octane, growling guitar-driven jet jams, you'll race through missions cutting the air with your thunky, chunky, satisfying weapons in your (somewhat) customizable super ship. You'll find yourself slicing through entire armies of enemies, taking down a few giant bosses along the way. The sense of movement and impact is satisfying, to say the least.
Controlling the ship feels good, it's very snappy and there's a great sense of speed to everything. The weapons feel strong, the enemies mostly shred like fodder regardless of what weapons you prefer to use. Early on the game clues you in to a special "drift trail" attack that has a real satisfying weight to it, especially when you use it to wipe out a whole conveniently lined up row of enemies. All in all, if you're looking for a hard sci-fi anime power fantasy, you've found it.
But first, let's talk about ROGUE FLIGHT as a game.
Well... if you're looking for a hard sci-fi anime power fantasy, you've found it, for better... and for worse. You will breeze through this game, and I say that knowing that gaming journalists exist and most people can barely tie their shoes. It's taken me longer to write this review than it ultimately did to play through the main portion of this game, and I am not some sort of TAS speedrunner savant, I'm a middle aged internet catgirl with a busted Xbox controller. It says 11.6 hours as of the time of this review, but at least half of that was spent with the game open, troubleshooting my stream and writing this review. After two hours I had 75% of the achievements, after 4 hours more I was at 88%.
The difficulty slider seems to mostly impact how much damage you take from hits, which doesn't really make things more "difficult" but it definitely ups the frustration level a ton. A base element of the straight-ahead rail shooter design of this game is that depth is struggling to be represented. For as little as any enemy in the game even bothers to shoot at you, it is very difficult to intentionally dodge bullets coming at you from askew angles relative to the camera. There is a boss that shoots lasers "straight" ahead and regardless of how close you think you are or are not to them, you will probably eat a random hit because you couldn't tell where they "really" were. It's annoying enough to not bother with, especially since it seems the difficulty selection itself doesn't change much else.
You know the drift trail attack I mentioned feeling so cool? Yeah, it's your absolute best option against any fodder in every level of the game. It only falls out of favor come boss time where the sustained damage isn't high enough. What this ultimately adds up to is you spamming the slow-mo drift trail attack, over and over again, because shooting the enemies takes slightly more effort for no actual benefit. The game is aware of this and, as mentioned, mainly sends enemies at you in polite horizontal lines to be deleted. There's even a mode where you do nothing but this attack so clearly I'm not alone in finding this out.
Stages feel a bit barren. They look cool at first blush but there is nothing like a Corneria or even really any Star Fox stage as far as environment & details go. The majority of the stages are a blurred amalgam of speed lines, lens flares, and random non-collide-able debris for visual intrigue. They leave virtually no impression on their own (beyond the lava stage, which itself is an homage to a more detailed level from Star Fox 64). The most prominent feature on any stage is the progress bar at the top, showing how much longer you have to keep killing fodder enemies until the boss shows up.
The bosses are the most interesting enemies in the game, and another place where it's really taking inspiration from other rail shooters like Star Fox. Without exception, they're basically static segments of the rail shooter where you knock out some targets and then shoot a big red weak spot. Unfortunately they also don't have much personality and usually have one really basic attack pattern. I never felt pressed or pressured by any of the bosses in this game, basically. Again, the higher difficulty options just punish you more rather than making them more difficult. Particularly for the bosses this is bad because getting a game over means sitting through the whole boring stage again.
Your first run through will be fresh and fun but by the "true" ending of the game you've played every stage at least twice, most of them three times, and absolutely nothing about the experience will make you want to keep doing them. Dying to a boss and having to redo the easy boring fodder-enemy part of the stage that drags on too long is a non-starter. It's not like a Star Fox where you're seeing through the chaos, identifying enemy patterns, and trying for some sort of score goal. It's just... going forward into lens flares and blowing up a bunch of enemies with the drift attack for 3-5 minutes.
Look, I'm 5 runs deep into this game and it isn't throwing anything new at me, I'm not going to go rifling through the many minutes of monotony to find the tiny pebble of friction or personality the gameplay maybe has to offer. I'm just not.
Do I still recommend ROGUE FLIGHT? If the aesthetics sound AT ALL appealing to you, I do. This is a love letter scarcely written, don't entirely write it off.
The thing is, this is an experience that just doesn't get richer as it goes along, it rubs itself raw, wears through the paint and exposes the less than impressive core. That's okay, games can just be what they are, they don't have to be some expansive, never-ending experience. I'm still left wanting for more, more personality, more memorable stages and enemies, more upgrades, boosts, weapons, and variance between runs. That's what I was hoping for and it didn't really match my expectations. Hopefully after reading this, it matches yours.