Rogue Eclipse

I've only had time to play two quick runs but so I've enjoyed how "pick and play" friendly this is, launching me straight into the action, drifting circles around bigger ships and overloading myself so I can unleash a salvo of bullets in their face, hunting down dozens of the smaller ships and picking them off one by one while the music thumps in my ears. I dunno if I'll ever be good enough to look as cool as the promotional material but I can see there are some big challenges ahead of me and I'm looking forward to giving them a go! (btw I played this on controller, with headphones on and I think that might be the best experience!)

I want to like this game, Ace Combat is one of my favorite game series & I've pretty much beat all of them on their hardest possible difficulties so that in space but roguelite should be right up my alley right? It is but the fact the game doesn't feel fair on any difficulty makes it hard to have fun with it especially when ship upgrades & the upgrades you get along the way don't scale well with progress, in fact all upgrades feel useless outside of moving faster as everything will kill you in half a second if you can't move out of the way in time regardless of your shield & armor strength. Especially against enemies running the normal laser weapons, you get in view of them you're pretty much dead on the spot & it feels like the longer a run goes the more accurate enemies get with no explanation. Suddenly after getting 2 levels into a run the enemies become impossible to approach because they've developed aimbots from god. All that aside getting back to ship upgrades there's no real benefit to trying to take the long route back to a boss because the game practically decides you should die by the 3rd level of any run & isn't as evil to you if you use a shortcut back to where you left off after surviving the first encounter. Where I currently am in the game most of my runs die within the first 10 seconds as I just cannot get good angles on the dudes with the normal laser weapons before they shred me 9 times out of 10. The game makes it seem like the upgrades are for longer runs because they add such tiny upgrades to armor, shields or damage, that they would only really make a difference if you can get 3 or more of the in a row but again enemies feel like they scale faster than you can get upgrades & a run that goes from the start to the boss without dying is going to have a much harder time than a run that used a skip to get to the boss. Honestly this probably just a not for me situation & I've been repeating myself alot more than likely with this review as I look like the only one complaining about the difficulty & I wish I could label this as informational but since Steam only gives a yes or no option & the fact my experience really makes me not want to play this game ever again as dying within the first 10 seconds of a run constantly just isn't fun to me I just have to mark it as not recommended.

This is a really fun prototype to a potentially great game. In its current state it also does not justify its price. It plays like early access, it should have been early access. The premise is very smart: Armored Core loadouts, Ace Combat gameplay, roguelite elements between fights. The game fully delivers on the basics for this: the spaceflight is pleasant, the explosions are fun, bigger enemies have modules you can prioritize. The aesthetics of space age Arab culture are a staple ever since Homeworld, and this game represents them well with beautiful skyboxes and soundtrack. The trouble is, there is nothing else here. The roguelite systems are rudimentary, unlocks are very few, enemies are hard to read and have very little mechanical depth. Enemy modular system basically has no impact. Worst of all for a game like this, controls are non-mappable, and keyboard-and-mouse is not even a visible option in the settings. The actual flight is very smooth, but the experience is sullied by the frictions and shortcomings around it. The only real conclusion is that the publisher let this game down: another year of development, with or without early access, could have been enough to make this game deliver on the scope its systems promise. As it stands, it is a very strong foundation for a largely hollow experience. I wish the developer luck and hope that the game gets to grow through updates or DLC.

Visually, the game is on a solid level and the space environment looks genuinely impressive. The gameplay is fast, forgiving of flight mistakes, which is great for beginners, and the basic difficulty is set quite reasonably. The menu, however, feels rather barebones — plain and not very polished. There’s a lot of room for improvement here, as the interface is an important element for me personally. The shots fired by large enemy ships at small fighters look odd, and their visual effect makes it hard to see what’s happening. This is another area where clarity could be improved. For the price, the game is most likely worth it, and I’m enjoying it. I’m excited to see how it evolves, because the potential in a space setting is practically endless. Hopefully we’ll eventually get a more detailed ship‑upgrade system and maybe even different pilots. The game definitely has a promising start.

Gore gameplay is pretty solid, I had fun flying around and blasting. At surface level it's an enjoyable game, I'm not sure how much of the game changes after the first few hours, but hopefully they keep updating it so include more variety. The only thing I could ask from my time on the game is a barrel roll. ;)

What a blast-from-the-past kind of game with a modern, refreshing feeling. I've been waiting for a game like this for a while, and it definitely does not disappoint.

This game feels SO GOOD on the sticks! And it looks SO good! Love the music and enemy designs as well!