I love a roguelike. I was going to say that I love a good roguelike, but I’ll be honest with you, not every game I love is actually good. There’s a whole tirade here I could go on about why you’re allowed to like bad things, but that’s for another time. Anyway, I don’t think MineGeon: Renegades is bad, but I do think it’s got a few ugly elements. It can be a lot of fun, certainly with friends, but man, it’s a big old grind to say the least.
This is one of those roguelikes where you’re not expected to get anywhere near the end of a run on your first attempt. You’re meant to struggle against the walls of big numbers that you hit, against bosses that flatten you in two attacks, and against screen-wide attacks you have to figure out as you go. It feels a little bit cheap, to be frank, but hey, as long as you managed to do a lot of mining during your run you can snag some upgrades and do a little better next time.
That’s not to say that skill doesn’t play a part here. This is a twin-stick roguelike where you can move out of the way or dodge through attacks, or find the safe zones when radiation gets pumped into the arena. You can get through on skill alone, but the damage ramps as quickly as the number of enemies, and it’s just a slog if you do manage to get ahead of your intended place.
The enemies in each biome are fairly limited. The first one is mostly slimes, with a couple of variations, and then sometimes robots, for example. You’re then fighting a mini-boss from amongst a pool of scavenger enemies, bounty hunter-feeling things, and then a big boss at the end of it. You get to choose your path, but you choose a set of four rooms, not on a room-by-room basis. It’s an odd one on the navigation front, but it’s fine. You’re mostly fighting things, that’s the vibe.
When you do get back to your ship, you then get to spend your resources on upgrades. Sometimes these are things like new machines to upgrade other stuff, new rooms to find in the MineGeon, and also a vacuum to keep your ship clean. It’s a very clear loop. You go in, you mine, you die, you upgrade, and so on. You also level up as you go, getting to spend those points on either your drone, to be able to carry more ores and whatnot, or your character. There are three characters, each with a different ultimate and different stats, but you’re mostly just shooting stuff.
