STEVE MILES·THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019
Can you take a Mario obsessed Robot through a series of challenging courses emulating his hero or just like me, keep persistently failing miserably?
Rogue Singularity never pretends to like you. From the off, you get to pick a robot, change its parts into various colours, and then given 5 lives to proceed through as many challenging courses that you can muster, filled with traps, hazards and various other dangers, all willing to kick your iron butt into far as deep a space as possible! Of course, because this is a Roguelike from the off, you move into various course areas, collecting as many coins as possible and should you use up all 5 lives, it’s game over but with a carry over of all the loot collected in the run through.
Coins can be used to improve your robot at the main hub, including new parts, new abilities and new upgrades granting various powers and abilities to make each run through easier and quicker! Yes, there are online leaderboards that record best scores and fastest times and also Daily Challenges, and with each course randomly generated, there is no reason to fall foul of tedium and boredom here.
From the off, this game is difficult and mightily challenging. If it’s not the rotating lasers, cannons or psychotic bouncing bots stopping you for starters, it’s the default camera view! It’s just too far away and although it’s much better brought forward, there is still the problem of not really seeing what is over the ledge in front of you. That means having to stop and rotate the camera view just to work everything out, meaning that against the clock, you’re constantly losing time. This would be all well and good if the courses were fixed, allowing you to learn the layout and get quicker with practice, but the random generation aspect promptly puts pay to all this. Another bugbear with random generation, is that you can get a run of easy levels, and in this case courses, then another run with one difficult course after the other and it rings true here!
In summary, Rogue Singularity is best recommended for Mario lovers wanting a break and something challenging in between.Movement and camera views stop fast paced and fluid course runs, and for everyone else, it may put a lot of people off,so the verdict..?
It’s a solid and challenging platformer, but the hardcore random element sadly shoots itself in the foot!
Thanks to Considerable Content for the code.
