Rogue Station

fun

fun game which you can put down and come back too

Fun game, not as involved as other management sims like rim world. This is meant to be played in shorter bursts, you will eventually get stomped. That said i've had some pretty long runs, that are painful when it finally ends :(

Could use some QOL updates, frame rate locking and a hotkey to hold fire would be good.

SNAPSHOT

A flash-based lesson in frustration

OVERALL - 3.5 / 10

PROS

+ interesting base-building / management mechanics
+ useful upgrades for everything you can build

CONS

- heavily RNG-based
- not balanced whatsoever
- graphics are on par with that of a Flash game

FULL REVIEW

Honestly this game is nowhere near woth $10 - it's maybe more of a $3-5 game depending on how much you play it. Overall it ends up being more frustrating than it is fun, though, as there are a number of scenarios you can end up in through sheer RNG leaving you have no choice but to restart and wonder why you're even playing it in the first place.

While there is a high amount of micromanagement possible in the game to help mitigate RNG luck, being forced to do so for every. single. fight unfortunately makes the game painstakingly un-fun to play. There is a kind of priority system that you can try and automate things with, but the default settings are bad and needing to re-set them every. single. game is just as much fun as playing it at regular speed (i.e. not fun whatsoever).

Starting the game is a roll of the dice - often times you will get lit on fire or some system will get disabled before your crew can even reach a station. If you're lucky enough to not have that happen, though, there are pleny of other things to make you want to stop playing. Being caught in the middle of two opposing fleets appearing that somehow target only you is almost certainly my favorite way to get blown up instantly.

If you've made it this far and somehow think this still sounds fun don't blame me when you end up uninstalling and wish you could still get a refund.

not sure how this compares to FTL but I love it

i wont say the game is bad.
i will however say the game is tedious.
the game never uses more than a gig of memory but there are 4 loading screens from starting the game to actually playing the game. then there are two unskippable walls of text with a drawn out fade out fade in before you can start playing.
then there is another wall of text that doesnt matter every single time you start up the game.
a hallmark of a good roguelite is getting back into the game without wasting the players time. this game faceplants hard on this and wastes the players time.
then there is the choices in game. with three different weapons types, laser kinetic and missile only one is completely inneffective against its defence measure at tier 1 that is kinetic. the kinetic defence completely overpowers the tier one kinetic weapon to a sad degree. the tier one laser and missile weapon can overpower their defensive measure but the kinetic cant.
every single combat encounter you have to manually target the same things every single combat. defensive measures then power then weapons. every single encounter.
i cant say its bad. just tedious and monotonous.

Rogue Station is one of those nice rogue likes that you can pick up and pack away if your in a time crunch.
If you've played FTL and want something on a more similar vein, with a light emphasis on base creation/expansion, then it's the right game for $10 USD

PROS:
- Easy to pick up, a few mechanics to master
- Can be beat in an afternoon
- A good sized meta progression buffs/challenge system to churn through
- Unlockable captains to change your start, initial weapon loadout, and buffs
- Decent visuals and a solid soundtrack
- Lots of unlockable weapons, buffs, and upgrades for your station

CONS:
- Game play loop can get fairly stale after a few hours
- Takes a bit to grind up the meta currency for some of the more interesting perks/challenges
- Difficulty can be at times can swing wildly

=== THE TAKEAWAY ===

Solid Roguelite to spend an afternoon with, or play with long periods in between sittings.
If you wanted a similar FTL experience and enjoy space roguelite games, then you'd most likely enjoy this gem.

Worth the $10 bucks, grab it.

It's an OK game. Repetitive after a short amount of time, but ok.

Very fun game.

A good time killer, but not nearly as replayable as it would appear.

If you are a completionist you might enjoy it for 10h or so.
If not, you'll enjoy it as much as I did which is between 2-3 hours.

The game in itself isn't bad, it's nice, has some nuance to it, but becomes stale quite fast,
there's 5-6 different captains and 2 different "campaings".

You have to balance between having economy and upgrading the stations defenses, energy, etc.
But frankly just investing as much as you can into economy early on will make you go above the difficulty curve quite fast.

Don't think the game is easy tho, on normal (and more so in hard) it can be challenging to "win" depending on the RNG of your techs and perks (technically it's infinite, but gets harder after the win con is reached).

If you have some spare cash, you might want to try it, otherwise I wouldn't bother if I were you, there are better and more interesting games both mechanically and gameplay wise.

Lightweight space roguelike heavily influenced by FTL that is more than the sum of its parts. I don't know what it is about this one, but I can just go do a run so easily that I keep coming back to it. Definitely recommended, especially for the price.

easy to pick up and yet difficult. alot of strategy. could implement multiplayer... but really fun to play

just play FTL...

Its nice I liked it.
Its not a rogue lite that you will get pretty much stronger per each run (unless you use gadget for that)

Its a mini base building and defend in waves while mining for cash. Good gameplay.

But overall its a nice fun game, I played 9h, tried different things, I was able to finish a normal run no problem.
For the price it was worth it.

Great wee ship builder game

if you have your mouse at the edge of the screen during the tutorial when the first enemies appear you get soft locked since you cant stop the screen scrolling and you cannot skip the step of the tutorial that requires you to click on the enemy ship (that is now offscreen and you cannot go back to it...) only thing you can do is alt + f4...

The lack of setting customization in this game is absolutely ridiculous.

The only thing you can adjust is the resolution and the refresh rate, but no matter what the game will always resolve back to 165hz, which means that the game is absolutely killing the CPU for no reason at all.

Why on earth would I need 165hz in a game like this? Why would this require that my CPU burns at 100 degree celsius and my fans to go to maximum speed to cool everything down?

Why does the game freeze for 10 seconds every time I defeat an enemy?

I actually like the game, but the fact that I cannot play this on my gaming laptop for 5 minutes without having the laptop burn up is just absolutely retarded.

These should be easy things to fix - just let me tune down everything. Let the game run at 30hz if that is what it takes.

The concept is pretty good for a sandbox style. build a station, fend off foes, make money. It would be a great game if they hadn't gotten rid of manual aim. Instead its up to the computer how to aim so instead of taking out one enemy at a time you skip between all of them and barely get past their sheilds before you get blown away. The normal level if fine but hard can be an exercise in futility where an obviously winnable battle gets constantly lost because your men refuse to finish off the one ship with the BFG and instead fire at everything but it.

Cute roguelike.

5% halo (has a feature like skulls to make the game easier or harder)
55% FTL (combat and general in space, has ship and crew you upgrade for story)
40% Rimworld (a lot more customization of your ship being able to build pretty much whatever you want; crews have job priorities and more skills than FTL)
I’m sure there is more I forgot to add here but it is a fun game, does not take much to get to where you can steam roll the game but there are options to make it more difficult, and while it doesn’t have as much replayability as something like Rimworld and I got mine on sale, even for $10 id have no complaints.

Similar to FTL. Try to build your ship and survive wave after wave of ships, improving your ship in between fights and managing your crew. Balance economy and upgrading, with a touch of roguelite.

You can find this game 40%-50% discounted, and at those prices its a must-buy. If you're not the patient type, you can safely buy without discount too, worth it.

Great for increasing your heart rate and blood pressure!