Ranking of Roguelikes #10: Star Renegades

It's been a while, huh? March just flew by and I had a hard time figuring out how I wanted to structure this one, then I got busy with other work and personal projects, and now it's mid-October and I realized I never finished it. Better late than never, I suppose?

Let's take a look at one of the more creative entries in this genre.

Star Renegades takes some of the best ideas from other genres and blends them together into something wholly unique. What it does, it does very, very well: it's a 4-hour RPG with over a dozen character choices and a relationship building system. It has loot, meaningful character progression, and even a nemesis-style system where bosses can level up if they defeat you or be resurrected to try again if you defeat them.

How far did I get?

I spent at least 50 hours between two different saves. I finished three successful runs, unlocking several new and alternate characters and seeing most of what the game has to offer. I beat it at the Extreme difficulty level once and have no desire to try the higher ones.

How does it play?

You lead the titular Renegades through three planets and the enemy mothership. You pick a team of three at the beginning, and you'll pick another team member after you complete each world. These choices matter almost as much as any other. Star Renegades is about teamwork. You're outmanned and outgunned by the Imperium you're fighting against. Your team needs to be able to handle that challenge: at least one tank to absorb damage and keep everyone else alive; someone who can break enemy armor and do significant damage to them; and someone who can delay the enemy actions and minimize the damage you take. Some characters can play more than one role, but you'll need someone in each role if you hope to win. The characters that can slot into one of the roles are sufficiently different from each other, in large and small ways, that using one over another gives you a significantly different experience. Most of them have mulitverse variants that give you even more ways to approach the run.

At each planet, you have three days before a Behemoth comes to steal the Maguffin that you're trying to protect. Each day you have three zones you can unlock that will have a battle, gear, money, experience, permanent buffs, or healing.

Some enemies are named elites with more powerful abilities and consequently better rewards. They persist from run to run, and if they manage to kill your team they'll get stronger and gain even more abilities. They can get quite powerful if you're not careful. I remember one in particular that slaughtered three of my teams. I built my next team specifically to destroy him and it was cathartic. I didn't finish the rest of the run, but it didn't matter as long as that bastard was dead.

Every night you rest and have the chance to build relationships between the Renegades. When the relationship between two characters develops to the next level, they'll give each other bonuses and often a powerful combo move. You have limited resources to build the relationships with and you won't be able to maximize them all.

At the end of every third day on each world there is a Behemoth boss fight. The Behemoth is a fixed fight in each world, although it can level up and gain new abilities if it defeats you. This lets you learn its patterns and prepare for it. This doesn't mean they're easy! They're merciless and can easily ruin even the best prepared team. It does mean that you can maximize your chances through making smart choices over those three days.

Experience is a resource that you give each Renegade as you see fit. They get stat bonuses for each level as well as more and usually better skills at certain levels, but of course each level gets more expensive. You'll never have enough to get an entire team to level 10, so you need to make difficult choices about which Renegade will benefit the most from this precious resource .

Weapons, armor, and accessories are found from battles, special crates in the different zones, or merchants at the end of every world. These are almost more important than higher levels. The right combination of stats and ability enhancements can make a weak character the cornerstone of your strategy. There's never enough to give everyone the best stuff

Combat plays out over a series of 60-second rounds. Each combatant takes one action per round, and those actions take a certain amount of time to execute. The entire timeline is visible to you, letting you see the consequences of your actions before you commit to them. Some moves will delay actions by a set number of seconds, and if they're delayed past the 60 second mark the enemy will "break" and be unable to act that turn. In addition, acting before an enemy makes your attack critical, adding damage or other effects like increased stagger, damage over time effects, or debuffs. Enemies follow the same rules: their attacks will delay you and they will also get critical hits if they act before you.

You need to manage your actions and the enemy actions effectively in order to survive. The learning curve is steep and requires paying close attention to the effects of every action and reaction, but the payoff is worth it. Getting the drop on several enemies and picking them off one by one in true guerrilla warfare style is incredibly satisfying.

Difficulty ramps up considerably in each world and gets downright unfair once you reach the alien Mothership.

How does it rank?

Star Renegades gives you important choices at every step of your journey. Who are your initial three Renegades? Who are you going to add to the team as you go through the run? How are you going to develop them with the limited gear and experience you find? Are you going to build up one unstoppable character or make a balanced team? How will you develop their relationships? Will you focus on making one character the leader, gaining the benefits of several smaller bonds but foregoing the significantly better benefits that the deepest connections give?

How will you make your way through each world? Will you go for the safer enemies or challenge the elites that give better rewards? Is it worth it to chase money over experience? Will you sacrifice the chance for a permanent upgrade to a character for an unknown piece of gear?

What about your moment to moment decisions in battle? Eliminate one enemy and let the others take their turns, or hit them all this turn and hope you can finish them all off in the next? Do you burn some of your limited use skills in this fight and risk not having them for the next? Do you sacrifice one Renegade so the others can finish the fight?

What's Star Renegades does well is give you just about perfect information before you need to make these decisions. You know what each character's skills can do, what their relationship bonuses will give, and just how each piece of equipment will affect them. You know exactly what your actions, and the enemies, will do before you commit to them. You can change them on the fly and see what will happen. There are rarely any surprises.

The great strength of Rogue-likes is that they are story-telling engines. You get to experience something wholly unique every time you play. Star Renegades is brilliant at this.

This was my second successful run and it was very close to a failure.

My strategy for the entire game had been to use my Maryadi's ability to redirect damage to herself and regenerate her shields to keep my damage dealers alive. I had invested heavily in her training and equipment: she was my only maximum level Renegade and had a frankly ridiculous defensive setup: that 423/423 bar below her portrait is her shield strength. Shields regenerate at the end of every encounter AND she has an ability that restores a percentage of her shields. She was the rock on which the enemies broke themselves, truly the Aegis of the resistance. She was awesome.

I didn't feel threatened by any encounter. We smashed our way through the alien armies until we had cornered them in their Mothership.

About halfway through the final battle, the boss prepared an attack that would kill over half the team. Maryadi had a skill that guards everyone, redirecting the damage towards her. She would die, but the rest of the team would live. It was the only option I had.

Losing her almost made me quit in despair, but I had come to far to give up. I needed a new strategy. Losing one more Renegade meant losing the war and starting over in another dimension. I agonized over every action, planning and re-planning each move so that the boss could not act, or was weakened enough so that their action wouldn't kill another comrade.

And I did it. The remaining Renegades came together and pulled victory from the slavering jaws of defeat. Most importantly, it wasn't their individual skills that won the day. Without the combo skills they learned through becoming friends and soulmates they wouldn't have had a chance. If they hadn't built those bonds over the course of their journey they would have died in the bowels of the Mothership. They succeeded because they were a team.

No one else could have had this story. Even if they picked the exact same characters and built identical relationships, there is no way they could have experienced this particular outcome. That's what keeps me coming back to this genre.

The stories I create for myself? Awesome. The story and writing in the actual game? Not so awesome. They chose a tone that grates on me, something I associate with some really rotten early 2000s work. "Look at how quirky and zany we are. We're soooo self-aware about what we're in. Isn't it cute that we know all of the tropes of the genre and wink and nod about them constantly? Isn't that edgy and cool?"

No. No it's not. It never was. It's annoying. Stop doing it or hire writers that can make it work.

In addition to the tone, there are vignettes you can access around the maps. They're complete filler, a few lines of flavor text and banter about something in the world. The problem is that these vignettes are rarely scripted with the party you have in mind. Instead, they're just random things that each character says without any care or relation to who they're speaking to. It's jarring, especially because I think there are a couple of pairings that are proper scripted conversations. Why not spend the extra time to make more bespoke conversations? It makes the rest feel careless and not important. They knew this, because there is an option to turn them off completely.

Hire writers and give them the time and money they need to make great scripts! It should never be an afterthought.

If the writing was a little better this would probably take Nowhere Prophet's spot, but it's good enough to be our new number 3. Congratulations to Star Renegades!

You can see the rest of the list here.