Rogue Flight Is Pretty Generic, But New Game Plus Saves It

Today we're talking about Rogue Flight - an anime-inspired indie rail shooter that is, unfortunately, about as generic as you can get. There is still some good here, especially once you unlock new Game Plus so for under $20 it's  worth a look, but don't expect anything new or groundbreaking.

Rogue Flight has been promoted as being inspired by 80's/90's sci-fi anime, but that inspiration is only surface level. When you tell me something is "anime" I kind of expect anime characters, but the only anime here is the face of the protagonist and that's it. The ship design is generic. The cinematics are generic sci-fi. Nothing about this game other than the fact the main character has big eyes is particularly "anime". 

The video embedded below follows the same script, so skip down there if you don't want to read all of this.

The story of a rogue A.I. taking over the military and killing almost every human on Earth is also pretty darn generic sci-fi and not something exclusive to anime. We've already seen it a hundred times before in things like The Terminator, The Matrix, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Generation Zero, among many many others, and Rogue Flight doesn't do anything new with it. Even the plot points of your character being the only pilot left on Earth, and having to go on a one-way suicide mission to the edge of the solar system are totally generic. 

There's only 3 characters in the game - your female pilot, a military man, and a woman doctor - and they have all of the personality of lawn clippings. It's easy to look at the gameplay and go "that looks like Star Fox!" - though it isn't like Star Fox is the only rail shooter out there ... - but you won't find any of that charm or personality here. 

The gameplay is, you guessed it, nothing special. At least at first. It's a rail shooter so you just automatically move straight forward as waves of enemies fly in just to get vaporized in seconds. You have lock-on missiles along with a few other projectile weapons that you pick up through the story, but none of them feel especially powerful. You can also upgrade your ship and weapon stats as you progress through the game, but none of them make a tangible difference to how the game feels to play. 

The missions are, well, boring. No big interesting set pieces. Nothing that changes up the gameplay. Just fly forward killing everything you see for a few minutes until you get to a boring boss with giant flashing weak points. There are three routes through the game - two where you tackle different strategic targets and then return to Earth, and a suicide mission where you do everything but can't get back - but they're all the same stale gameplay.

When you beat the three routes, however, things perk up a bit. You unlock New Game+ and get to see the real ending to the story - which should be pretty obvious considering the previous ending was the "you can't get back to Earth" bad ending - but the gameplay changes a bit as well. The game throws way, way, way more enemies at you in New Game Plus, and suddenly the gameplay is a lot more interesting. The game has a combo system where you kill enemies in as long of a chain as possible to get high scores, but the combo aspect only sort of works in the initial playthrough. In New Game Plus, because there are so many enemies onscreen at all times, putting together long combos and getting high scores is really, really fun and addictive and will keep you coming back for more as you compete on the leaderboards. 

I have to say I was pretty disappointed in the game overall after my initial runs through the game, but New Game Plus made it much more interesting. It doesn't do anything differently besides throwing more enemies at you, but it made it significantly more fun even if the core gameplay itself is still extremely vanilla. 

And that's where I'll leave it, I think. The promise of anime inspired anything, especially 80's and 90's anime, will always grab my attention, so it's disappointing Rogue Flight doesn't really do anything with that supposed inspiration beyond super shallow things. The story is generic. The gameplay is mostly generic. The presentation is generic. But then you hit New Game Plus and suddenly the gameplay gets a lot more interesting and fun and you wonder why the gameplay isn't like this from the start. The game is $20 ($18 on Xbox, for some reason) so if you're interested at all I'd say it's worth checking out, just know that it doesn't really kick into gear until you get to New Game Plus, at which point it gets kinda awesome.