QUICK LOOK Minegeon: Renegades

What the report says

Kickstone Studio brings players together in Minegeon: Renegades — a three-player co-op roguelike shooter with diverse biomes, giant bosses, and plenty of secrets to uncover. After a heist gone wrong, players will choose one of the three Renegades to start with. Hijacking a shuttle and escaping the authorities by the skin of their teeth, they wind up near a far-flung planet outside of most civilized planets called PAIMO. The player is the only one who is still healthy enough to look for resources or help the other two members and find a way to get back home.Like many roguelikes, players will go from node to node through each biome of the planet, ending with a boss fight.

Players don’t choose each node individually, but a set of four nodes to go through. Exploration levels, combat arenas, shops, and minigame challenges are just some of the options that will appear. In each node, players will find enemies to fight (for experience to level up during a run) and mineral deposits to mine for permanent progression between runs. Each level grants a small power-up like shooting faster, larger clip size for the guns, orbiting drones that damage enemies, and so on.I love the pixel art and the sense of character each of the Renegades have with each other, and the shooting feels acceptable for a roguelike shooter.

I get a lot of Enter the Gungeon energy in my runs, but more grounded and less wacky in terms of tone. Currently I haven’t had any luck matching with people online to play multiplayer, and sadly, Minegeon: Renegades as a solo experience has been miserable.Most of the experience is about mining minerals and leveling up, but the act of mining is unbearably slow from the start. A single deposit could take four or five seconds to open fully in the first biome (longer in later levels) and players can’t really afford to skip deposits since because that’s where most of the experience comes from.

Key details

As such, I spend most of my runs staring at my character slowly mining instead of exploring or fighting. Talking more generally about mechanics, Minegeon feels uninspired. Enemies all fall into three basic categories — ones who charge, ones who shoot, and ones who tank a lot of bullets. None of the guns feel unique or stand out. All of the upgrades feel insignificant, and some level-ups only shine in multiplayer when it gives bonuses to other teammates.These impressions published here are from playing Minegeon before August 28th, which is when the developers dropped a significant update that took care of many additional complaints I had about the game, which have now — thankfully — been addressed.

Despite the patch smoothing out some earlier roughness and bringing the game to a better state, I’m still not high on Minegeon: Renegades as a single player venture, but I do want to give it a chance with multiplayer. One thing that gives me hope is that the developers seem aware and responsive to player feedback, so I hope that there will be a future version that sings for me. But for now, I think it needs to go back into the oven and bake a bit longer.The post QUICK LOOK Minegeon: Renegades appeared first on Gamecritics.com.