Story:
Deadzone Rogue unsurprisingly doesn’t have much in the way of a story. The game is focused very heavily on combat and the roguelite loop. The only semblance of a story you get is that you’re a guy that wakes up on the ISS-X space station with no memory of how you got there.
Deadzone Rogue is a first person shooter with roguelite elements to it. You’re placed on a space station and it’s filled with enemy robots and deadly machines. You start out with a pistol and can obtain new weapons as you defeat enemies, room by room.
Once you clear a room of enemies, you get to pick up some of the dropped weapons and armor that they drop, and you also have the ability to select something from the item, perk, accessory, or weapon cache that will spawn at the entrance of the next room.
One of the really cool elements of the game is when you enter a room for the first time, you enter in a stealth mode and are completely invisible to the enemies in that room. This gives you the opportunity to determine what enemies you’re going up against, how many, their movements, and ultimately give you the opportunity to strategize as to how you would like to take them out.
Not only do you pick up dropped weapons and armor from your downed enemies, but you get to pick up scraps. These scraps act as a currency for upgrades that are permanent and stay with you each run you make through the space station. Like with most roguelite games, the game is designed to keep having you repeat the same rooms so that you can work on unlocking and applying permanent upgrades to aid you and get further and further through the game.
One of the neat things about Deadzone Rogue is that you can play the game not only solo, but with up to two additional players through online co-op. This is neat because it’s not often that you see a roguelite game that offers a co-op experience.
Graphically the game is very impressive. While playing the game, I had everything on High settings, at just over 1080p resolution and it still looks really good. Weapons all have a metallic and heavy look and feel to them. Textures on the space station with its surfaces, the occasional rock materials in carts laying around, all have great looking and rather lifelike textures to them. But where this game truly shines is in its use of lights and shadows.
Because the game takes place on a futuristic space station or space station, there are a lot of lights. The walls of each room feature lights, as do the enemies you encounter. Though hiding in the shadows doesn’t do much if anything in a firefight, it’s nice to be able to hide and take in the enemy movements and the use of shadows is great. On the flip side of this, the lights on the enemies are really nice to look at and at times a bit scary. There is something to be said seeing the neon glow of an enemy visual sensor as you’re low on health, just hoping that you survive the encounter and it drops a health item upon defeat.
When it comes to performance, like I had mentioned, I played the game on 1080p resolution with everything set to high setting with TSSR Aliasing. With these settings, I was getting about 45-50FPS which for me is more than playable. I could have gotten 60FPS or more had I brought things down to low or maybe even customized it a bit. The issue I have with that is that once you start setting certain things lower, the game starts to not look so good. I would much rather prefer the game to look as nice as possible while still being playable.
So with these settings, the game performs very well. There isn’t any slowdown or jittery and it’s a smooth experience. Just goes to show you that even if you don’t meet the minimum specs on a lot of PC games, you can still find a way to play most games with a bit of compromise when it comes to graphical settings and resolution.
Deadzone Rogue looks and performs great, but how does it sound? Well it sounds as good as it looks! The music in this game is hard hitting with a heavy metal vibe. This really helps to get you into the action and is really a joy to listen to. Aside from the music in the game, the sounds of the weapons seem authentic. From the machine gun fire of an automatic, to the boom of a shotgun blast, it is very satisfying. The heavy sound of your robotic foes as they walk around the room, and the scurrying sounds the spider bots make, all sound nice but at the same time eerie and foreboding.
So in a nutshell, the game sounds great and I am glad there was music in the game instead of just having it be focused on weapon fire and enemy movement sounds. Without the music I don’t think it would have been as enjoyable as it is, so definitely glad it’s here.
Deadzone Rogue is a great FPS game and as a roguelite experience, it doesn’t feel like it’s too prevalent here. I mean yeah, it’s definitely present, but it’s easy to forget it’s a mechanic with how hard hitting the FPS aspect of the game is. I found myself only really noticing it after a few runs because the rooms you fight through are the same, with only the occasional swap of a few enemies.
I can say with total confidence that Deadzone Rogue is a game that you should be playing. It brings a lot to the table and even with it being in early access, it shows promise as being one of the best FPS games we have in the modern era of gaming.
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.