“Spaceflight action for the new age! Push your piloting skills to the ultimate test, blast and burn your way through swarms of starfighters, merciless armadas and colossal behemoths in an epic roguelike campaign that spans the cosmos. Easy to learn, tricky to master, and impossible to put down.” – Steam Description

Rogue Eclipse is an arcade style space dog fighting game. I’ll be honest, the last space game I picked up was Star Wars Squadrons and that’s been almost 6 years ago? So I was excited to jump into this game made by a solo developer with a unique style and see what they were able to put out.

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The Vacuum of Space

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You play as Malak, a pilot who who wakes up with Dr. Noor after losing consciousness for an unexplained reason. You find the entire Dhahab Fleet HQ has been taken out completely and the Phiraun faction is gearing up to launch a heavy attack. You jump into the cockpit of your customized Starfighter and head out to conquer the waves of enemies to defeat the boss on their home turf. You can select the difficulty for your run between Recruit (easy), Cadet (Intended Difficulty), and Ace (Hard) depending on how confident you’re feeling. At the beginning of every run you have the option of starting the tutorial again which can be nice if you step away from the game for a period of time and want a refresher. Once you complete each wave you are given a Jump gate to go through, or if you’ve completed runs prior you can unlock Shortcut Sectors like finding a shortcut in Nioh or Dark Souls.

After you complete your run you are given three options for upgrades to choose giving you some authority over your build as you progress through the stages of your run. There isn’t an option for damage numbers to appear when you deal damage so I don’t notice much in the way of my normal missile versus one whose damage is increased to 105%. None of these upgrades felt particularly impactful.

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Pimp My Ride

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As you complete your runs you can unlock new parts for your Starfighter. Much like pods in Star Wars Pod Racer the different frames have different base stats so you can find one that handles like you’d prefer. There are also parts that you can unlock like different generators or different weapons. All of this lends itself to customization to your liking.

Outside of the different weapons, I couldn’t really tell much of a difference between something with a Max Speed stat that stopped at the P in Speed, or one that stopped at the D in Speed. That could just be because, well, in space there aren’t exactly road markers to indicate how fast I’m going.

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• Graphics– Graphics are what you’d expect from a space game. They look good, definitely relying on that Unreal Engine for the general graphics, but the ship design is unique and sleek. The different models that you can unlock was unexpected and the colors were even more a pleasant surprise. However, there can be a lot going on on the screen and the effects can sometimes obscure you making you lost in the minutiae of your gameplay. I felt this the most when I was taking damage, because there isn’t a visual feedback like a noticeable screen shake/flash to indicate and with everything going on it was difficult to look at the bottom of the screen to monitor my ship health.
• Gameplay– The gameplay takes a rogue-like approach. You start a run and it takes about 40 minutes to an hour to complete a full run. You travel to the same systems over and over so it does feel a bit repetitive and does little to hide the loop which is much to it’s negative. I feel like rogue-like/lite genres excel the most when they give you variety. Either in enemy variety or in build and this game doesn’t do much in either direction, the shortcuts are the only way to spice up your run but it’s just skipping some rooms along the way.
• Sound– The sound design is a wild pendulum. The shooting lasers sounds feels nice and arcade-like when I’m firing, the missile lock on when I’m being targeted is clear and concise. However, the sound and music get muffled from what I can tell when you take damage. There’s no other hit indicator that you are taking any damage besides the sound getting muffled, and I feel like there should be some sort of visual feedback, or some sort of hit notification noise to make it clear to the player.
• Controls– There are a lot of controls which I guess should be expected in a 3d space… space game. The coordination needed to brake, boost, and roll with the shoulders while using 3 different face buttons to attack and one face button to lock on is something I couldn’t really grasp effectively. It might just be a me issue to be clear, this might be a young man’s game but I think controls could be streamlined a little. Reading through early hotfixes there was a problem with stick drift which the developer has addressed, but I feel maybe overcorrected. When I tap the stick I feel like my ship snaps to different directions which can be jarring and takes getting used to.
• Story– The story in this seems like an attempt, you start with a cut scene. Throughout the missions there are transmissions with dialogue that talk about the enemy and how you need to take them down.