Chocks away, skipper, it’s time to take to the skies in this great rogue-lite dogfighting indie title from Infinite State Games, the studio behind Don’t Die, Mr Robot and Frutorious HD.
In Rogue Aces, you have one life, three planes, and an entire army to take down. In short, you take off, shoot some baddies, land, refuel and repair, and go again. The gameplay loop is that simple and a whole load of fun!
In other shooters, you move your craft around the screen as if it were a mouse cursor. In Rogue Aces, however, the movement is fluid and allows you to swoop the plane around, dive down as you mow down enemy tanks and soldiers, and pull off some awesome aerial manoeuvres while engaging other aircraft.
At first, you might struggle to land the plane or find yourself getting distracted in a dogfight and put your fighter into the side of a cliff or end up going for a swim in the ocean. That said, after just a few minutes with the game, you’ll see that the plane actually handles like a dream.
Visually, the game doesn’t look at all like other shmups, for one it’s not set in space. Some might be put off by the cartoony art style but we love it and there are a load of really nice details.
Make sure you don’t get distracted by your plane’s silhouette as you fly in front of the sun and get taken down by an enemy fighter like we did!
In terms of weapons, your regular cannons could maybe carry a bit more oomph but the bombs and missiles feel so good to fire that we constantly found ourselves returning to base to reload them just so we could go and carpet bomb more stuff!
The writing is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek and you’d have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy The Commander’s delightfully British banter! When he gave us the order for us to take down swathes of soldiers because they’d been heard singing rude songs about “Her Majesty”, we couldn’t help but chuckle.
As fun as Rogue Aces is, it’s probably too repetitive to spend several hours playing in one sitting. That said, we certainly won’t tire of regularly picking it up and playing for between 10 and 30 minutes at a time.
It’s also a shame that there’s no multiplayer. We definitely reckon we could have tonnes of fun with friends. However, it’s not a deal-breaker as this is still a really enjoyable single-player experience.
While we got this with this month’s PS+ games on PS4 (which you should also do if you haven’t already), we reckon the Nintendo Switch version would be even better as we could definitely see ourselves taking down The Baron’s army on the go.
Rogue Aces is available on the PS4 and PS Vita as well as the Nintendo Switch.
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