Rogue Shooter: The FPS Roguelike Demo Torrent Download [PC]
Harold Yengo
I'm ending a week packed with Steam Next Fest demos on a high note with Gatekeeper, a top-down bullet hell roguelike clearly inspired by Risk of Rain. Pick a character, drop into a medley of environments, and shoot dudes while hoovering up items until the number stops getting bigger. It's a familiar formula with a new perspective, and while there are some mechanical and artistic similarities to Risk of Rain and its sequel, Gatekeeper feels like it's found its own identity.
I went with the default character for the demo, partly because they have a built-in second life (which I haven't lost yet, thank you very much), and partly because the vanilla character is always the best way to gauge a new roguelike. My kit also includes a standard aim-and-shoot full auto gun, a fireball AoE, a ricochet shot, and a basic teleport-style dodge. Imagine if Risk of Rain's Commando and Huntress trained up a bullet hell protagonist and you're most of the way there.
Rogue Shooter: The FPS Roguelike Demo Torrent Download [PC]
Download Zip >>> https://picfs.com/2yLICl
There's enough bullet magnetism to make abilities intuitive to land, but not so much that you can blindly chuck attacks into the crowd. Enemies range from slow-moving golems and sentient obelisks to homing droids, and kiting enemies around while picking off priority targets is key. I'll gun down stragglers while saving my big abilities for juicy crowds, triggering all the items I've amassed as I go. My favorites so far mirror some of my favorites in Risk of Rain: enemies dropping explosives on death, seeker projectiles triggered by attacking, applying burn to enemies, and so on.
One thing I appreciate in Gatekeeper is that leveling up by collecting XP is also a really big deal. There's a bit of Vampire Survivors in the way you draft boosts to your HP, damage, regen, movement speed, and cooldown reduction, and these stats can in turn affect what items you prefer. You also upgrade your abilities as you go, increasing their AoE, adding effects like burn damage, and so on. You really get a sense that your whole kit is evolving outside the items you're stacking on. I've been dumping everything into my fireball so far and have zero regrets.
Perhaps most importantly, Gatekeeper has a rather lovely soundtrack. I don't think anyone can match composer Chris Christodoulou's synth-heavy lullabies, but there's a nice set of of drum 'n bass thumping in my ears even as I write this with the demo paused in the background, waiting for me to dip back in and inevitably die. Gatekeeper isn't the most original roguelike I've ever played, but it's handling a fun combination of cool ideas pretty darn well. It's definitely earned a spot on my wishlist ahead of its Q1 2024 launch. (You can also try the free prologue version, which has nearly 3,800 "very positive" reviews on Steam and seems to be the same experience.)
Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible."}), " -0-7/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Austin WoodSocial Links NavigationAustin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.
Apologies if I'm starting to sound like a broken record these days, but here I am, back with another edition of "Have you heard about this cool new roguelike deckbuilder?" I swear I'll find a new/another niche one of these days, but listen, Pyrene is very cool indeed, and I lost a good hour to its free demo last week on Steam. On the surface, this might look like your typical fantasy dungeon crawler, but Pyrene has some neat tricks of its own, combining its own blend of resource gathering and roguelike citybuilding with Inscryption's number-crunching battles and a dash of Foretales' card-based exploration. And it has a lovely piano soundtrack to boot, too.
The demo begins with your village coming under attack from vicious monsters, and as local hunter Atanaia, you take it upon yourself to reunite your scattered friends and rebuild your home by venturing out on expeditions into the surrounding wilderness. The latter can be achieved by grabbing wood and coin cards from the forests, plains and mountains you'll be journeying through, but only if you manage to fend off the grids upon grids of savage-looking nasties you'll encounter along the way. A classic roguelike setup, in other words, and the more villagers you save, the more characters and deck types you'll eventually have to play with further down the line.
In its demo, though, simply keeping Atanaia alive with her five-strong deck of mostly restorative items is already quite challenging, so much so that I've yet to complete a fully successful run of it. But Pyrene does a very good job of tempting you back in for more, not least because its jaunty piano score helps to keep things light and relaxing.
Each biome consists of a series of rooms, a bit like dungeons in Cult Of The Lamb or The Binding Of Isaac, only instead of hack and slash arenas you're navigating card-based grids that are filled with monsters. Some rooms contain chests or characters that can upgrade your deck, but most live up to their "danger zone" moniker - and you'll only be able to move forward to the next part of the map by finding the room's respective Votive Altar. Naturally, that involves biffing as many monsters as you can during the day - with the difference between you and the monster's attack power gradually chipping away at your overall health - before camping out at night, and then rinsing and repeating until the Altar card makes an appearance on the board.
In the demo, the Votive Altar usually only takes between 1-3 nights to show up, but there are lots of lovely extra wrinkles that Pyrene indulges in to keep you on your toes. The first is how you move around each board, as you can only move into spaces what already have a card on them. That means no retreating into empty spaces, or moving around willy nilly. Movement must be precise and strategic, which, yep, scratches both of the puzzle and strategy lobes inside my brain. A secondary wrinkle is that leaving any monsters alive when you go to camp will award them an extra pip of health/attack power, so you'll want to plan your route around the board to maximise clearing them out, otherwise they will come back to bite you later.
Add to this the extra survival pressure of making sure you have enough reserves to camp in the first place, a constantly swelling deck of possible card combos - the number of which you're allowed in play is limited by your character's endurance level (just five, in Atanaia's case) - and an almost Grindstone-like reward bonus for killing more monsters before heading to the Altar, and Pyrene already has the makings of a great deckbuilding roguelike.
I certainly plan to spend more time with it before the demo disappears at the end of the month, so why not give it try on Steam yourself? Side note: I would have included this along with the rest of our Steam Next Fest demo recommendations, but technically it's part of last week's Quebec Games Celebration rather than Next Fest proper. Still, there's certainly no shortage of great games to sample at the moment, so make sure to give Pyrene a go as well while you're at it.
This article first appeared on USgamer, a partner publication of VG247. Some content, such as this article, has been migrated to VG247 for posterity after USgamer's closure - but it has not been edited or further vetted by the VG247 team.
I wasn't disappointed. Rogue Shooter was clearly made by people who know and love '90s shooters and wanted nothing more than to make a '90s shooter. Not a '90s-style shooter; a '90s shooter. As in, with all the limitations we had to deal with in that era. Maze-like levels with walls that are all the same height. A complete lack of a vertical axis. The inability to look up and down -- though without a vertical axis, why would you need to? -- and sprite-based enemies, objects and obstacles. Oh, and dreadful, dreadful MIDI music.
The garish audio-visual spectacle of the game -- which can't be anything but deliberately horrendous -- will be enough to send some modern gamers running and screaming almost immediately and that's absolutely fine; this title is clearly intended for gamers "of a certain age" such as myself. But it's more than just a nostalgia trip; by combining the frenetic pace of the typical '90s shooter with elements of the presently fashionable roguelike genre -- procedural generation, permadeath and RPG-style progression -- Rogue Shooter ends up being a title with a surprising amount of depth to it once the allure (or repulsion) of the DayGlo visuals and Casio keyboard demo-button music wears off.
The game's premise is authentically flimsy -- a space station has been overrun with aliens and you must charge in there, kill all of them (or at least most of them) and make it to the 100th level. Along the way you'll gather weapons and items that will help you out, though in one of the game's few breaks with '90s shooter conventions, you're limited in how much you can carry at once -- two weapons, a few pieces of armor, three usable items and a few miscellaneous gizmos. There's a System Shock-style weapon degradation system, so you'll need to make use of workbenches and collectible tools to maintain your weapons -- or simply find new ones -- and an authentically roguelike "hunger" system whereby your performance will suffer if you don't have enough rations to consume at the start of a level. You can also collect and combine "science" items to make useful consumables, and hack into tablets with a stupidly difficult minigame to earn more credits.
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