Space Rogue

Basically a direct clone of FTL with higher graphics and a few twists here and there. I enjoyed FTL a ton and was looking for another option that got close to that style of game play and this matched. I don't think there are any new updates coming anymore for this title, but it's worth a purchase while on sale.

*I encountered a single crash in 84 hours, but other than that, it was smooth gameplay with no frame lag or bugs*

Abandoned game! Mine freezes in the tutorial. It's a known, reported bug back to 2018, but apparently the developers had abandoned it by then. Save your money and time. Avoid this. (Why does Steam still sell it?!?!)

If the devs spent a few more hours fixing the bugs in the game, i would gladly recommend it, because it is (bugs aside) a fine game. Nice art, nice graphics (a perfect solution for those of us who love FTL but are not fans of pixelart graphics), nicely balanced, good ship variety, etc.
But sadly, there are just too many bugs for the game to be enjoyable.

Don´t buy!
I have reported several bugs like:

1. Crew stuck in places and don´t move anymore.
2. Upgrades not affecting anything
3. etc.

Is sent in proper bug reports (2 years ago) with videos showing it, but that effort was useless, since the developers have abandoned the game (no more updates since then) and these bugs will persist forever.

Basicaly beautified FTL, which is OK, that's what I expected, but... BUGS, BUGS, BUGS...I spent 10 hours in last three days playing this piece of crap, not a single time did I manage to go pass lvl3 sector (max 1 hour ingame). The game randomly freezes and crashes EVERY SINGLE TIME! I must have restarted 20 times before I realized I'd rather have a rectal exam than trying one more time. The best thing is that stupid autosave (the only way to save) saves game only AFTER IT FREEZES, so if you try to reload, the game automatically crashes (yes, every time you have to start a new game and loose your ship and crew). So, if you are masochist, not frustrated enough or hate yourself for having few extra bucks, I recomend you punish yourself with buying this game.

Its a fun game, very much like FTL with better graphics and without the hurry to exit the sector. In this game, you are going through a simple story line which probably took 1 hour to code, but can take you several hours to play through.

As with many Russian games, the game pings their servers. This is something I don't like much at all, and is a negative, who knows what data is being exchanged. And what happens when the servers all go down? I guess you will not be able to play the game anymore.

The game has an in-game editor (they call it a workshop, don't get confused about the naming choice). The editor allows you to make your own missions and rewards which sounds great! Unfortunately, you cannot play these missions until you upload them to the server, and the developers have to approve and make it available to players in-game. Since the game appears to have been abandoned, that never happens. So you will only be wasting many hours of your time making cool missions that you can never play. There are a whopping 2 missions in English that were made by the developers available after a year of the 'workshop' being released.

On occassion, the game will 'bug out'. The only thing you can do is quit and exit the game, then restart it, and hope your last save is good. Otherwise, your SOL on that play through. For me, the saves were always good. Since the game is abandoned, there will be no fixes to that bug.

At this time, I cannot recommend this game, unless you get it on a very good sale. And even then, don't expect too much from the game. About 10 of the hours I have in the game was making a bunch of missions in the 'workshop', only to realize they are completely unplayable for the above mentioned reasons. And I get no response at all from the developers or moderators on their forum, which is completely devoid of life.

Being a big FTL fan, I liked the idea of Space Rogue.

However, the game is very unbalanced and prone to frequent game-breaking bugs and glitches. I've had six or seven playthroughs and three of them had to be aborted because of bugs.

Feels like an alpha release, not a finished game.

If we look at FTL, and then at Convoy, we see that the developers took the parts that worked and were fun, and tried to switch out everything else, to great success. If we look at Space Rogue, we see that the developers took the parts that worked and were fun, and tried to switch out some other things, and failed. The result is that this game is two parts FTL, but it misses what made FTL fun. It's limited, confusing, with odd controls and loads of game-breaking bugs. Right now, my captain is invisible, and all of my crew members refuse to move, making the game impossible.

I'm gonna sum this up based on how it feels to me:

This is FTL casual edition.

It has the basic concept of FTL where you take your ship, jump from point to point through random generated systems, encounter random events and so on. But what it lacks is the time pressure.

In FTL you have the constant threat of the enemy forces looming over you and you are forced to speed rush through and get to the end or be over run. In space rogue you are taking a leisurely stroll through the galaxy at your own pace, you are the captain of your ship and your time is your own.

Sure there's missions you can do and jobs you can take, but you can move back and forth through the systems, even revisiting old systems to make sure you didn't miss anything, or to visit a shop for something you couldn't afford before.

The game can have it's challenging moments, and after you've beaten the game you unlock a host of customizable difficulty settings; but no matter what you make the settings, you never have that looming pressure of being forced to advance.

In FTL you can lose simply by not jumping forward fast enough. In Space Rogue if you are losing, it's likely because you jumped ahead too soon and didn't fully explore the early systems.

If you've ever played FTL and thought "I want to take my time and explore everything!", you will probably enjoy this game.

If you haven't ever played FTL… yea go buy that first…

Combat is very similar, though space rogue is a lot less micro management. In FTL you had to micromanage power issues and pay attention to things like teleporting your crew back before the enemy blows up. In space rogue your power is pretty much handled for you, systems are either on or they aren't and even your crew is auto teleported back when the enemy blows up.

You still need to prioritize room targets and direct your crews actions, but again there's less pressure and fewer tedious systems to ponder over.

I love FTL, but there's definitely room for Space Rogue in my game rotation for when I'm just not feeling that hardcore.

Side note: I have encountered a few game breaking bugs, but the devs are still active and were very interested in examining the issue (they asked for save files), so the game is still being worked on and patched, which is a plus. They seem to be talking about adding more content as well. There's a decent game here already, and it seems likely to keep improving a little.
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This game has a lot of undeserved negative reviews. Here's what I hope is something a little more impartial.

Space Rogue is an obviously FTL-inspired game in the same genre. However, this game is not, nor does it try to be, "FTL, but better". If that's what you're expecting, you WILL be disappointed (and that's likely the source of the negative reviews). Instead, Space Rogue should be recognized as being "Kinda like FTL, but different in almost every aspect".

So, aside from cosmetic changes, what's different? It's quite a long list. First, here are things that were removed:
- You have no Fuel count, no Missile count, and no Drone count. The related systems are always usable.
- There are no Doors, Cameras, or Piloting subsystems. Your ship is always able to jump/evade, you can always see inside both ships, and the doors always permit passage.
- On the default difficulty you have no time limit and can jump around between systems all you want. (Higher/custom difficulties can impose a time limit for a more FTL-ish experience.)

Here are things that were added:
- Monster fights, where instead of an enemy ship, you fight some tentacle monster, crystalline creature, or whatever.
- A new section, the Main Computer, and its associated Battle Cartridges. These give short-term boosts with a cooldown on them such as cloaking, shield boosting, setting fires in the enemy ship, instant repairs, etc. This replaces systems like the Cloaking and Mind Control systems from FTL with something more flexible.
- A new section, Life Support, which is a combination of the Oxygen and Medbay sections from FTL.
- The ship's hull is now an upgradeable ship section. Upgrading it increases the ship's max HP.
- Persistent events that occur at random and have a global effect (both you and enemies) for some number of jumps.
- A new currency/resource, Tritanium. Credits are used to buy weapons, drones, and repairs; Tritanium is used to buy Battle Cartridges and to upgrade/install ship systems. You don't buy systems, you just install them into your ship when you have enough Tritanium.
- A new enemy-only section, the cargo hold. Destroy it during the battle and the ship dumps the cargo in it, which results in bonus rewards after the battle ends.
- One of your starting units is designated as the Captain; if they get killed, this is a game over.
- Units come in different classes (engineer, navigator, or warrior). Engineers repair stuff and can man specific systems to make them more effective. The navigator (who is your captain) can man any system. The warriors fight well but can't man systems.
- Units gain EXP and levels. At a level-up you can choose a bonus to one of their stats (HP, damage, repair speed). Level 3 engineers pick a system that they can man.
- Roaming ships can appear on the map, resulting in an extra event if you arrive at a system with one still in it.
- There are multiple missions.
- An extremely intricate custom difficulty option has been added. You can tweak almost anything in the game to make it harder or easier, and you get more in-game experience for harder games. You can also make the galaxy bigger for a longer game.

Here's stuff that's been changed:
- Ship sections have HP counts that are typically multiples of 50, and weapons do numeric damage as well.
- Your shield's value is also numeric.
- When shields are brought down, some of the leftover damage punches through and damages the targeted ship system.
- Missile weapons have a salvo size. Once you fire all the missiles in the salvo, the salvo has to be reloaded, which usually takes about 4x longer than a normal cooldown.
- You still have a certain number of weapon/drone slots, but these go up as you upgrade the corresponding system.
- All battles start paused, and all your weapons are ready to fire immediately. Your opening salvo can count for a lot.
- As long as your teleporter is online, your crew will automatically be brought back upon destruction of an enemy ship, even if the teleporter is still recharging. This allows for more aggressive teleporter usage.
- New content is unlocked just by playing the game. Whether you win or lose, as long as you make progress, you gain experience. When a game ends for good (you win, or you lose and do NOT load the last save) that experience is cashed in and you unlock new ships, new missions, new perks (basically, permanent bonuses that lead to a specific play style).

Finally, here's stuff that's exactly the same as it is in FTL:
- Missiles ignore shields.
- Shields block energy weapons and flak ("cannon", in Space Rogue) weapons.
- There are different races that do different things, though Space Rogue obviously has its own unique set of races (plus, of course, the common and uninteresting humans).
- You can win by killing all the enemy crew (BUT - and I think this is a bug, not an intended mechanic - if your teleporter is offline when this happens, you lose your boarding party as if the ship had been destroyed!)
- Hull breaches suck oxygen out of a room and get repaired before any other systems in the room.
- Fires can start in a room and must be put out by the crew.
- You can't jump out of a system until your engines charge. The enemy must do the same if they want to try and flee.
- An in-game tutorial does an excellent job of showing you the ropes.
- Shops are your friend, and can repair you too.

So! Ultimately, the real question here isn't how Space Rogue matches up to FTL, but whether or not Space Rogue is fun. And I think that yes, it is, as long as you take it on its own value and don't try to make apples-to-oranges comparisons to other games. It has lots of replay value, and if you're bored of FTL, it's a good way to re-experience the genre. Whether it's better or worse is purely subjective, but the one thing you can say with 100% certainty is that it's different. And that's a good thing.

See this is having mixed reviews so figured I'd throw in my oppinion.

This is a "first impression" if you will, I just picked it up in the winter sale and have only played though one run so far (~3 hours in).

First: This is not FTL, it's very much a "FTL-like" though, it copy a lot of things from FTL, like the combat system and so on, but the overall game still play different.

One of the things is does not copy from FTL is the sense of urgency and scavenging your way. It's a lot more laid-back. There is no time pressure and no fuel to worry about, you can backtrack as much as you want and visit every single node on every map at your leisure and fly back to a station to repair as often as you want. Drones and missile weapons also have unlimited ammo, and just do a little less damage and have a bit higher cooldowns to compensate. This does make the game considerably easyer than FTL (my first run was a win, and it wasn't even close except one seemingly unkillable space monster I just ran away from). A nice little "quality of life" change is that your boarding party is automatically beamed back to your ship when the enemy ship explode (as long as your teleporter is not offline), so you can be a bit more reckless with boarding. You do unlock higher difficulty levels as your main profile level up though so there may still be some challenge to the game later on. [Edit:] Seem I misunderstood, all difficulty settings, including the ability to customize difficulty is available from the start, you only unlock ships, perks and scenarios.

Progression is pretty straight forward. At the end of a run you get "experience" based on quests completed, ships destroyed and various other goals and then your main profile level up, winning my first run got me to level 3 which unlocked a new ship and a higher difficulty setting. This makes progression quite liniar, you just have to keep playing, no convoluted random quests you have to complete during a run to unlock a particular ship, on the flip side it means you can't rush to unlock any particular ship, you just get them at the level they unlock at.

To help with re-playability you also unlock more scenarios as you level up, where FTL always have the same main quest (get to the last sector and kill the boss), there are several different ones to choose from (once they are unlocked). The starter quest involve finding a kidnapped scientist (with some twists), later ones have more epic threats.

Overall I'd say it's a fairly competent FTL-like that should appeal especially to those who find FTL too punishing with it's time pressure. There are higher challenge levels available, but you can always play on easy and indulge your power fantasy blowing away enemy (or neutral) ships left and right as well.

It is true what they say in other reviews.

This game is unpolished.

This game is TRYING to recreate what FTL has done.

This game's music isn't good,

Overall, it is a 3D wannabe clone of FTL.

I can't recommend it after playing and absolutely loving FTL.

The review options definitely need a "Maybe" option. As it stands, I'm going to have to lean towards no.

Like most reviewers I jumped at the chance of another FTL like game. But don't be fooled, this is a long way from being FTL. The visuals and sounds are great. The combat is OK; missile/rocket type weapons are really in need of balancing especially given they usually bypass shields. Essentially, upgrade weapon systems till you have 3 slots, fill them with missiles or rockets and aim at enemy weapon system. Done.

Unfortunately, flying to random planets and going through the mining mini "game" is just dull and repetitive; land on planet, click 4 hexagons, leave planet. There aren't enough ship encounters to keep it interesting and there doesn't seem to be any penalty for raiding the neutral shipping; might just as well attack them all. I'm only level 6 right now and to cap it off, I have to replay the same main story line again because the next doesn't unlock till level 8. Frankly I'm not sure I can be bothered to repeat an hour or so of tedium doing the same stuff just to get the next level unlocked.

Here's hoping for some updates that bring in greater variations, more encounters with pirates etc.

Edit:
Playing around with the custom options allows you to make the play area bigger.

As it currently stands, I could not in good faith recommend this product.

That is not to say; however, that it does not hold some merits as a successor to the genre started by FTL.

Pros:
-Great ship customization options
-The ability to pause during combat to help micromanage
-A diverse setting with numerous random and scripted events
-A unique twist on isometric and 3D graphics that adds depth to the gameplay
-Autosave function to continue your adventures even after you leave the game

Cons:
-Lack of crew customization
-Incredibly large number of bugs and issues
-Lack of a manual save function

Unfortunately I've experienced too many bugs while playing this game, and that is the single thing holding me back from recommending it.

At time you will find yourself being unable to do things ranging from upgrading your ship because you are "in combat" even when you are at a space station, to being completely unable to play the game due to the UI becoming 100% unresponsive.

I'll continue to play the game and keep an eye on future developments, but as it stands right now this game is simply too unstable to recomend as a fun use of your time.

It is obvious that this game is heavily inspired by faster than light.

But that is not a bad thing. FTL founded a new genre, the "Micromanage your Ship Space Rougelite" Genre. And Space Rogue is one of its descendants, a game which picks up the theme and make an own game from it.

An what an own game it is. No Fuel, Mission centric, no Ammunition for not-laser-based Weapons. All that means that you may be much more wasteful with your ressources, just head back to the last station 3 Sectors back and heal.

The 3 Missions already existing are really well written. My sole complaint is that this game doesn't seem to support the steam cloud, which is not really pleasent if you have more than one Device on which you play.

Nope.
- ftl rip-off
- almost no updates
- limited content
- bland gameplay
- bugs (really, a lot of bugs)
- expensive (twice the price of ftl which is ten times better)

pro tip: when you read that an early access game has "potential", run.

I had a longer more detailed review all typed up but it somehow got dropped.

Long story short: Space Rogue is a poor copy clone of FTL and it doenst improve on much of anything other than the graphics and sound and unfortunatly neither is a good change and actually makes the experience worse. In fact takes several steps back in terms of the balance and playability....

Thumbs down. No reason to play Space Rogue if you have FTL already.

Like FTL only worse. Very few "random" events (I say this because I get several of the same ones. sometimes in the same system.) Few choices for play style, not many weapons, upgrading your ship is tedious. This game could be better than FTL if it tried and maybe one day it will but for now, just go play FTL so you will have more fun.

4/10 Try harder guys

This game is good but of course things need to be adjusted as for example the mining system who is more frustrating than fun actually.
I think the damage system meter is not good, these white circles on the floor are not visible enough anymore when there is crew on it (for example, when they extinguish a fire, u don't see it anymore at all) and when you focus on the enemy ship, the small green icons and the red icons upper left are too discreet for getting your attention when something important happen in your ship, specially when you are concentrate on your crew to kick enemies's butts in their ships.

The annoying things :

• Can't drag and drop equipped weapon directly in shop (Obliged to put in cargo first)
  
• The hull damages
  
• Can't bind key
  
• The mining drones (perhaps i didn't really understood that when it's written very high chances, it's not about finding tritanium but getting your drone destroyed in flight and getting hull damages, or not finding tritanium and getting hull damages :p)
  
• You don't see what enemy's bribe is (u discover it after accepting it)
  
• The hull damages
  
• The window repair system (you should be able to spend directly what u have left even if it's not enough for a full repair instead of clicking every time on minor repair and buy)
  
• The hull damages (Did i mention it already ?)
  
• Having a button to directly jump in the next sector when u remain on the current sector instead of being obliged to go back on a planet and come again on the hyperspace beacon.
  
[*] Bugs... (once, 2 of my crew directly ran through walls, hull, continue to run in space and never came back after i order them to extinguish a fire, i've never seen such wimps !)

This game wants to be FTL & fails miserably. I realize it is early access but like so many EA games it seems to have gotten of track early and doesn't show signs of getting back on track.

Just a of the things that make the game less than enjoyable.

Too many choices without information as to the outcome.

Upgrading crew offers no choices so it should be automatic. Why waste the player's time?

Very cute graphics that obscure rather than reveal what the player is to do. For instance, weapon targets are not highlighted on the primary enemy graphic. Damaged systems are indicated by tiny icons in upper left screen instead of on primary graphic.

No sense of progress. Neither is there the conflict of resource management that underlies FTL.

Crew merely repair damage and fight boarders. No specialized skills. No crew posts so no real reason to choose any one over another

Too much focus on graphics at cost of game play. There is no sense of progress. No meaningful upgrades.

A SECOND LOOK AT THE REQUEST OF THE DEVELOPER:

I am leaving the original review below, so that you can compare for yourself, if you'd like.

While the changes are really nice, I have to give a reluctant maybe to this one.

If you're REALLY into rogue-like games, then you'd probably enjoy the punishment you need to endure to get up to a high enough level to be able to tweak things like difficulty level, but for myself I'm not really willing to invest that amount of time beating myself up so that I can get beat up a little less. My main enjoyment with a game is being able to go through the content.

I'm going to address my commented items below, in order, for clarity's sake:

Mining: They have made one large improvement to mining that I think is quite good - your ship no longer takes hull damage EVERY drone that hits an event. It takes three events for this to happen now. While a vast improvement, I am still confused how my ship in space takes hull damage from planet-based mining. (Developer: An easy workaround here is to a) do shipboard systems damage related to drone work, like the main computer, and the engines, or b) have a large credit expenditure for the retrieval and repair of said broken/exploded drones; if no money is available, they lose the drone and it's drilling chance for a number of turns until your engines make another). I still lost 8 hull to a mining incident, which made me hesitant to continue mining, even though it was my main source up upgradable parts.

Away Teams: Despite efforts, I never ran into an away team dialogue. I can't comment on this one, sorry!

Jumping to Planets: Happily, this seems to be fixed! I jumped to a dozen different places and wasn't damaged for simply moving myself along! Yay!

Ship Combat: This is the big sinker/floater, still. While I wasn't destroyed on my first encounter I was destroyed on my second encounter. And, after restarting I was destroyed again on my first encounter by... Psionics. A giant space squid? Great... but don't make it the damned spaghetti monster with shield-penetrating triple wave psionic beams at literally the second planet I fly to!

Also, while I'm on space combat: Boarding parties should scale with my crew/ship abilities. I don't know, maybe make an algorithm based on the level of my ship's systems for toughness of boarding parties? And, if there is already something like that, please dial it back a touch. I had to continuously repair this one open gash in my ship hull in a tiny 2-slot room while trying to defend my ship from another ship while trying to beat down a boarding party. Moving crew between my (destroyed, and still trying to fix that, too) healing room, and the hull rupture at the very furthest point of my ship was infuriatingly slow... no sense of urgency from my crewmembers who seemed to think that walking is about as brisk a pace as is possible. While this whole way of combat is fun sometimes, it's not fun when you know you're just really slowly losing the fight. If this was simply a review of combat it'd be a solid thumbs down.

Pop Up Dialogues: They didn't kill me every time, or cost me money. So, that's quite a bit better!

Other things I noticed: Damage indicators have been VASTLY improved. The captain still appears to be the only one that doesn't just stand around when put on a station; but, I'm still not certain if he's doing anything to give a positive benefit or stat to the station he's on. I also noticed many little changes here and there that have added to the ambience of the game, however, they aren't game changers in and of themselves.

Overall: The game is definitely getting to where it needs to go, and while this is a vast improvement on the previous iterations it's still not really hitting the mark at the core of it's gameplay. With some more combat improvements the game could definitely be a hard hitter. (Developers: If you want me input on those items, you can feel free to contact me directly.)

It's getting there, it really is.


I wrote this review on May 5th, 2016. Almost exactly one year after the previous review. And, still: Hopefully in a few months when you read this they'll have a playable game out there, and my opinion will be outdated, again!

Until then, happy gaming in whatever game you choose!

TL:DR

Much has changed, combat still frustrates, ship go boom, crew go poof, shinier game, buy it? maybe, devs working hard, captain is a mad scientist.

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PREVIOUS REVIEW


You're going to want to hold off on buying this one...

I think I'd really like this game a LOT more than Faster Than Light if it wasn't so damnably annoying.

You want to mine the planet? Don't... you'll somehow get hull damage, even though you sent a mining drone to the surface.

You want to send an away team to that ship with no life signs? Don't... you'll lose a crew member.

You want to jump to the next planet? Don't... you'll once again get hull damage.

I've travelled through about 5-6 different "sectors" of 12-15 "systems" so far, and I've had to Alt + F4 the game because I got a random shipboard fire (from who the hell knows where...) and it wouldn't zoom in on my ship, so I couldn't assign crew to fix it.

It doesn't matter, though. I was about to close it out anyway.

Every single move you make in this game is infuriating, annoying, and irritating.

Let's take mining for example... you have four SEPARATE drones you send down, but if just one of them hits some event your ship WAY up in orbit takes hull damage, and you lose everything you've mined from previous drones in that encounter.

Let's take ship combat... my first time playing the first ship I encounted used psionics on my crew, pierced my shields, and used hull breaches to destroy me in about 15 seconds. My VERY first encounter... A little excessive for my weak shields and 2 weak weapons...

How about pop up dialogs? You will (90% of the time) lose out on these. You'll lose credits, crew, or hull. Usually hull... they LOVE destroying your hull in this game.

This game DOES have the ability to be good... even better than Faster Than Light (which it seems to be a glossy version of), but they'll need to add configurable ships, better ship damage feedback (instead of that silly wheel on the ground to tell you how damaged your components are), and make it so that ANY crew can take a station... not just your captain.

They also need to make the game 250% less irritating (hull damage, drone mining, crew deaths, etc, etc, etc).

BUT! If they can fix it... and I realize it's (incredibly) early alpha... maybe they can pull a game off.

I bought this knowing that the 5 thumbs ups before me were all from developers. They always pull that crap with their own games... so I decided to take one for the team.

I wrote this review on May 14th, 2015. Hopefully in a few months when you read this they'll have a playable game out there, and my opinion will be outdated.

Until then, happy gaming in whatever game you choose.