Streets of Rogue a retro, rogue-lite game that makes dying so much fun
Streets of Rogue is chaos, but tackling it with mates makes for riotous fun. This little indie dungeon-crawler knocks it out of the park but they don’t make staying alive an easy feat.
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Browsing the online gaming platform Steam, I’m always curious to see which surprise indie releases are doing well and getting people talking.
Lately, it’s undoubtedly Streets Of Rogue.
It’s a top-down, retro “rogue-lite” (a play on the “rogue-like” genre of incredibly tough, procedurally-generated dungeon-crawlers).
I don’t typically go for this kind of game, they’re creative and quirky but also painfully difficult and I admit I lack the patience.
But Streets Of Rogue reeled me in with talk of wacky humour and “completely insane” multiplayer chaos.
I have a great group of friends I love to game with, so — on the recommendation of the overwhelmingly positive Steam community, we all bought it and booted it up.
The game is … certainly wild.
You’re thrust into an odd tutorial with many jokes at the player’s expense; teaching you the basics of getting around, using items and understanding missions.
It doesn’t hold your hand and does a great job of setting you up for the kind of mania you’re about to face.
You have a choice of characters (each with different class attributes). The starting classes have fairly basic abilities, but the unlockable choices available are fun and unexpected: you can unlock the comedian for example by killing anyone (even yourself) with a banana peel — which a character that can get enemies onside by telling jokes.
There’s a doctor armed with a chloroform hanky who can knock anyone unconscious — making for some hilarious friendly-fire hijinks.
You can even play as a Vampire with irresistible cologne, or a cannibal who can … cannibalise.
Starting out there’s a lot of panic and confusion. You and your friends are a group of gangsters tasked with taking-out targets and robbing safes for cash — as well as achieving other individual class-based objectives.
At first, the levels are fairly simple: a series of buildings and rooms, police patrolling the streets, you and your buddies trying to use whatever you have at your disposal to break-in and get the job done.
But levels are procedurally generated (meaning the game populates a random level design each time — no two play-throughs will ever be the same) and they have different scenarios that become increasingly more difficult.
Sometimes you’re an instant target to all authorities. Other levels present you with waves of killer robots. There are mine carts that whizz through on rails and flatten you if you get in their way.
One level we played had a timer that counted down from 20 seconds over and over — and if you were caught outside a building whenever the clock hit zero — you’d instantly explode. Play this game — and be prepared for infuriating and repeated amounts death.
As a multiplayer group we took a lot of damage early on in each level, and once you die (which doesn’t take more than a couple of hits) you can be revived by another player but only if they have enough health to do so — which is rare.
In our group, we became entirely dependant on the one member of our team who had chosen the soldier class — which is blessed with slowly regenerating health.
As we each died over and over, our ghosts would shadow her until she had enough health to bring us back to life — rinse, repeat. She was working hard repeatedly resurrecting our corpses as we hurled ourselves back out into the massacre.
There are consumable health items in the world — but they’re few and far between, and without the soldier in our party I highly doubt we would have lasted as long as we did.
It seemed a bit unfeasible at first and we subsequently made a plan to all of us play as soldiers next time — but somehow, we persevered.
We screamed, laughed, died, robbed more safes and disarmed more traps, each time just managing to scrape through.
I had chosen to play as a hacker with the ability to control security systems, install malware and poison the air systems of the buildings we needed to access.
When I was not being plagued by killer robots, these proved to be useful skills to the group and it turns out that if we made a plan, were careful and actually worked together — things did start to go our way.
There are game modifiers that can be applied to online sessions that I think we’ll consider applying next time just to level the playing field a bit.
You can add infinite durability to weapons for example so they don’t break after too much use. You can remove killer robots entirely (although I wouldn’t — they’re too much fun), or the 20-second explosion timer.
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Tampering too much I feel would suck all of madness out of the experience, however — and that’s ultimately what we came for.
Honestly I’d just like the ability to be able to resurrect my friends even when on low health — but I don’t think there’s a modifier for that.
Streets Of Rogue is the kind of game that seems ridiculous, but you find yourself constantly going back for more. It’s chaos, but tackling it with mates makes for riotous fun, and it has a killer soundtrack to boot.
The people have spoken — on Steam, anyway — the game is a hit, and I have to say I agree. This little indie dungeon-crawler knocks it out of the park — I only hope I can stay alive long enough in the next game to see it through.