Welcome to the new arcade shooter called Rogue Aces, available on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4! Our review was based on gameplay of the Switch version!
Join the Rogue Aces today as Wings Mc.Pilot & Co, in this procedurally generated, adrenaline-fuelled fight to the last plane!
It’s time to join the Rogue Aces and liberate the islands from The Baron and his dreaded pilots. Will you be able to face the fiercest of foes with only one life and three planes?
Take down waves of dastardly enemies in this endlessly emergent air combat rogue-like where nothing is the same twice. With a multitude of game modes to discover, no loading screens to stutter the action and a whole lot of landscape to take back, jump in the cockpit and take back what’s yours!
Made by Infinite state games, who, I must admit, I did not know. I checked out their site to find out they were UK-based, London and Bristol, and a 2 man team with very good taste in games! This game was published by Curve Digital, who did ring a bell.
Rogue Aces is an arcade shooter with a very specific premise. Do your best to survive in a set of crazy missions. You start off with the basic tutorial which is a good first experience with the harder control scheme. I call it a harder control scheme, but it is really a more natural way for the pilot to fly their plane.
Some arcade shooters respond right away when you turn around the plane, in a unnatural way almost, but Rogue Aces does it way more realistically. At the same time, this is impressive and annoying. Impressive to be so true to the real motion, annoying because this style of game, in my humble opinion, does not call for realistic controls but slightly edited ones to allow you to take more agile turns.
I admire their work on the controls, don’t get me wrong here, I just always played similar games with slightly different control schemes and I have really gotten accustomed to those.
To explain my annoyances, imagine tapping the “landing” button, you end up crashing into the plane carrier. I kamikazed several times right into the sea and into the ground. To the point of wanting to toss my pro controller…
Game-wise, the control scheme for me, it dictated my gameplay too. While I was rather enjoying the dogfights with the smaller enemies, I could not enjoy the ones with bigger carriers or parachutists. Those, I ended up hating thoroughly. I kept being unable to just swipe in and destroy them in 1 fell swoop. Maybe I just suck at the game, that should also be considered.
In conclusion, this game is fun to a point. I think it could be a very valuable addition to anyone who likes arcade shooters. It sadly did not do the trick for me, but I refuse to give it a bad score. I can clearly see the intention behind the game, the passion, the design, …. This game is proof for me that everyone can enjoy a genre and not enjoy a game in its genre but still appreciate the game. I appreciate this game very much and thus give this game a 60% rating!
Tested on Nintendo Switch
