Rogue Drone is a top-down mining and base-building game from indie developer KBGS who have previously released a similar title, Swarm me.
Rogue Drone a relaxing time killer.
When I first read up on Rogue Drone, I was intrigued; as a lover of RTS and city-builder games, this game seems to borrow from multiple genres wrapped up in a colourful Sci-fi setting. In Rogue Drone, you take control of an unmanned mining drone and are tasked with scouring a barren landscape for increasingly limited resources in the form of Gems, industrial waste and scavenging fallen satellites for electronics. These must be taken back to camp to be recycled and used in upgrading and defending your base. You quickly notice the game is set in two phases: daytime, which is safe to explore, build, and gather. Then nighttime, when the enemy sends spacecraft to probe your defences.
Although initially I found the mining and resource collecting quite relaxing, you mine resources with your drone’s laser and have to ensure you don’t overheat and explode your target, wasting valuable time and materials. After getting to grips with things, you will have to wisely manage what you have; you can choose to invest in your drone. Will you make it faster, increase storage or give it a more potent laser? These things make it far easier to explore and gather, or you can put everything you have into defending your base. But this slows down the time you have to collect and mine, which makes things increasingly difficult.
Inevitably, nighttime arrives, and the enemy will send increasingly larger amounts and types of spacecraft to attack your base; these vary from small fighters to massive battleships with energy shields that will lay siege and destroy your base quickly. You have several types of turrets you can deploy to deal with different enemies; however, you can only build these during the day phase, so when nighttime arrives there is no changing this, so you had best hope you correctly placed the amount and type of turrets to deal with these threats. This leads to quite stressful situations later on as you deal with dwindling resources but ever-increasing waves of more powerful enemies.
If the timed mode gets too stressful, you can opt for free play if you select this mode, you can manually activate the night phase to start giving you time to gather, upgrade and prepare for the inevitable enemies to arrive.
With regards to the base building this could do with some improvement, you are limited to placing only a certain number of buildings and turrets in a specific grid pattern although this adds to the simple design of the game while playing, I found myself wishing I could have freedom to place items where I wanted for example turrets in the centre of my base to defend rather than strictly on the outskirts. As much as i enjoyed the game I found the replayability limited once you have upgraded everything sadly there is little else to do however if you enjoy games you can pick up for 20 minutes as a distraction this game serves that purpose.
Clean sci-fi visuals.
The visuals of the game are simplistic but quite vibrant; all the buildings and turrets are distinct, and you can clearly see what they are and what they should do. However, when the night phase starts, things can quickly become cluttered, especially later on when you have huge amounts of enemies and different types of craft attacking your base. Really, as you don’t control anything during this phase, it doesn’t affect gameplay. Personally, I would like to know exactly what is being attacked for later repair if you survive the wave. Similarly, the audio is fine; there is a looping sci-fi soundtrack, and the sound of your drone mining is rather soothing, which again contrasts with the arrival of the enemy armada, which results in a huge number of effects from the ships and turrets attacking each other.
Simple controls and interface.
The interface is very easy to navigate, and there is a small in-game tutorial that pops up with helpful hints, which is good because initially upgrading things can be a bit confusing. The game really shines on a handheld device like the Steam Deck. I downloaded Rogue Drone to my Legion Go S and found it handled it perfectly.
Rogue Drone is a fun distraction.
Overall, I really enjoyed Rogue Drone and found myself picking it up to play for 15 minutes, only for an hour to quickly fly by. The game really excels on a handheld device, and I will definitely be playing this on my next short haul flight. So, if you are looking for a simple yet fun base-building and tower defence game, I can recommend picking it up here.
