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  1. It's easy to pick up quick, casual games, the ones that only require a few actions so anyone can quickly learn, but the other kind of games? The ones that make you work to even understand the mechanics of how to efficiently play? Those ones hit differently. They challenge you at every turn and make every little piece of progress feel like an incredible success. Star Renegades, a roguelike with turn-based battles and a unique action speed system is hard to learn and hard to master, but the process of learning it is awfully satisfying. If only the game ran more smoothly on the Switch. Star Renegades takes place in the midst of a galactic war—worse than that, it takes place in a multi-dimensional war. The alien invaders, the Imperium, are conquering planets across dimensions, so it's your job to hop into different realities in order to fight them off. Talk about a brilliant concept for a roguelike game—the whole reason that you fight, die/win, and repeat is baked into the premise of the narrative! That said, the writing itself comes off scattered. The game throws a lot of details at you, a lot of names of people, places, and alien races which can be overwhelming to follow. The actual characters you play as aren't terribly fleshed out either and are mostly two-dimensional warrior types with some scattered backstory that pops up in dialogue which is funny but doesn't always seem to suit the game's setting. But since this isn't a linear, narrative-based adventure some of that writing can be forgiven in favor of the focus on combat. Star Renegades is a roguelike with turn-based battles. You start off a run with three characters and travel to different planets to fight off the Imperium. You can see the whole map but you have a limited number of days to explore, so you have to choose which paths to travel down. Virtually every area includes a battle but they might also feature bonuses, like items, defensive buffs, or DNA which is used to level up your characters. There's a nice sense of strategy at work here: do you want to fight the harder enemies for a chance at finding better items, or do you slowly level up by fighting normal enemies and collecting more modest bonuses? Healing is also limited in Star Renegades so the health of your party is always a major factor. These decisions make for an engaging, thoughtful challenge as you progress through a run. The battle system features its own set of strategic challenges as well, which is fun once you have a grasp on it but honestly pretty hard to follow when you first start up the game and are overwhelmed by information. Granted, there are a lot of details to learn here, but the way the game dumps this info on you will make the first hour or so—and likely your entire first playthrough—fairly confusing. The most important thing to know is that battles are turn-based, and during one turn your characters and the enemies all act across a 60 second span. Some attacks (usually more powerful ones) occur later on that time span, while others will trigger earlier. If your attack lands before the enemy's, you'll gain a critical hit bonus, though the same applies if they attack before you. Most of your attacks have the ability to push the enemy's action later in the turn order, giving you a bigger window to land critical hits. If you push an enemy's attack out of the turn completely, they'll "break" and won't attack at all on that turn. Managing the order of attacks during a turn, both yours and the enemies', is the key to combat in Star Renegades, and once you get a handle on it it's a blast to play with. Some characters might excel at pushing an enemy's action, allowing other characters to follow up with a big critical hit. Because healing is rare, avoiding enemy attacks or tanking them with shields (which regenerate at the end of combat) will be your main defensive strategies. It's a lot to keep in mind while playing but once you find a good rhythm with a balanced team it's incredibly satisfying to direct the entire flow of combat to your advantage. As your characters level up they'll gain access to new attacks and abilities that further allow you to manipulate the tide of battle in unique ways. Star Renegades also features an adversary system similar to Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Some powerful named enemies—lieutenants in the Imperium's army—can actually level up if they manage to kill you. The next time you face them (on a new run, potentially with new characters), they'll be stronger. It's an interesting way of further stretching out the replay value of a roguelike, though the effects aren't so major that they'll significantly change the enemy lieutenants. It's more just a fun way to take revenge on the boss that killed you previously. And yes, like all roguelikes there's a huge emphasis on replay value in Star Renegades. Your character choices will significantly affect how you play, the maps and placement of bonuses is always random, the items you get are random, and there are several difficulty levels to test your skills. There are also some permanent boosts you can unlock, like class modifiers that grant extra bonuses for your characters, so there's still a slight sense of progression every time you complete a run. Star Renegades' biggest fault is simply how it runs on the Switch. In a word, it's poor. Frequent crashes which may necessitate replaying parts of a battle (there's auto-save but sometimes it'll take you back to the middle of a battle you just finished), choppy animation and sound even during the opening cinematic, notable loading screens—the whole experience of the game on the Switch just isn't optimized (based on the 1.0.5 version of the game). Even outside of those overt technical issues, the game's UI doesn't feel like a good match for the Switch. Reading all of the information you need during battle—your attacks, enemies' attacks, special effects, etc.—is a hassle and often feels clunky. Even just navigating the menu while examining or equipping your party doesn't feel smooth. The UI may work better on other systems, but on the Switch it's awkward, which is particularly frustrating in a game where you need to monitor a lot of information at all times. Even the game's pixel graphics—which is a fun art style—comes off cramped and cluttered, which really doesn't allow for the visuals to shine. Star Renegades is a unique roguelike whose overwhelming amount of ideas can make it hard to get into, but rewarding once you do. The Switch might not be the right platform for it though, based on the frequency of crashes, choppy animation, and cramped UI that make simply playing the game a challenge, when the difficulty should come from the rich strategy gameplay. There's definitely something fun here for roguelike fans, but the Switch version is probably the wrong place to play it. Rating: 6 out of 10 Renegades
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