Star Renegades

With a description like Roguelite strategy RPG, Star Renegades sure looks like an interesting game. And it is! But unfortunately it has one fatal flaw and that it's too repetitive.

The game does have many interesting concepts. First as a roguelite with JRPG-style battles, it's sure a nice twist on the genre. It kind of gives Slay the Spire vibes too with the turn based combat. The enemies also work in a sort of "Shadows of Mordor" type system where the enemies that kill you get promoted and get stronger and your next runs, so the bosses you face will sort of alternate in between each round. The battle system is a little complex with a bunch of keywords and effects that are hard to understand at first (the tutorial just throws all the information to you with very basic explanations), but after a few runs it all to starts to make sense. You have equipment that you find in chests (randomized of course, with unlocks for future runs) and there is a camp system where you trade cards with your characters and they get relationship status for further buffs.

The main problem is that as the game starts to make sense, the game also starts to feel the same over and over again. The game does follow a certain RPG path, and each run feels exactly like the last one. Each stage is placed nearly exactly the same, you have the same number of battles before boss and it all feels too similar after a while. And then you hit a certain wall of difficulty and then you die and have to start over. You get to unlock some new characters as you get enough intel, and that brings a nice variation but it's really not enough to keeps things compelling for a long period of time. Note that the game will allow you to pick easy or normal before each run, but it should definitely explain that you should pick easy no matter what cause you are going to die anyway and the easy difficulty will allow for more unlocks... the normal mode, it's near impossible to get past the first Behemoth with the initial trio of characters and hides a lot of the game behind that.

Overall I feel that Star Renegades is "too bad" cause it has so much potential and really interesting concepts, but after a while it just feels like banging your head on the wall to play it further. It would need more variance between runs to keep things interesting in the long run, there's not enough variation for me to play it as much as the game intends you to do. It's worth a try to it would be hard for me to give this a high recommendation.