4.5/5 ★ – nldemo's review of Star Renegades.

Star Renegades is a delightful tactical turn based game with surreal pixel art, challenging combat, and a not so perfect roguelike gameplay loop. The primary reason I picked up this game is the superb pixel art. It looks very reminiscent of Hyper Light Drifter, and is absolutely gorgeous in action. Every time I opened a new world map or new battle stage I had to simply take a knee (or screenshot or two), while basking in its beauty. Each world map is akin to a board game, where you can play out your 3 days worth of 3 moves each. This is important as certain paths will yield various boons like equipment, permanent stat boots, or simply more XP, and you do not have enough time to visit every tile. Visually, maps are littered with nature, ruins, optional secret dungeons, and corpses of titans, and I found myself in awe of the titans and wishing for more information. Star Renegades did opt for an anime opening, which kind of strangely is not as good as the pixel art when you get in the game. The combat is definitely tough, but never overwhelming. If you make a few wrong choices, you will lose team members, and likely fail your mission (Edit: Found out death of a character results in character resurrection with 1hp after completing a battle). Unlike most roguelikes, it's actually quite possible to beat on your first run if you make smart decisions. It's not quite as brutal as Darkest Dungeon (your units aren't going to stop taking orders from or turn against you), but it does demand your attention. This is not a JRPG where you can get away with spamming regular attacks until boss fights. Speaking of bosses, each world you navigate through has a series of mini bosses that you can go to in pretty much any order, or skip completely, then a final world boss. The end boss fights of each world are especially fun, and the sound track certainly SLAPS for the unique battles to get you in the mood for the upcoming trial. I also have a soft spot for the random transfomers-esque audio that the enemies exude in-between rounds of battle. The most unique aspect of the combat is the single turn timeline. Each turn, every unit can go once (with some rare exceptions such as special skills), and there is a single timeline that displays when each unit gets to execute their ability. Certain skills can delay your opponent, but there is a cap to how far you can push them back, and a cooldown that prevents you from further delaying them on the next turn. This kicks off your endless struggle to delay damage for as long as possible, while doing as much damage as you can, or taking out priority targets before they get a chance to eliminate your squad. The only negative things I can say about the combat is sometimes the tooltips read as if they were not translated very well (which may be possible if the Toronto studio is a French one), and it's not always super clear which enemy is represented by which avatar on the timeline. That said, both of these downsides can be figured out through a little experimentation in battle - most of which can be cancelled before executing. Combat also consists of shields (which regen to full after each battle), armor (which mitigates damage after you lose your shields), health, gear, relationship boons, and combo skills! There are a bunch of cool classes and synergies to experiment around with, and that plus giving the art another gander are the real draws to keep playing on NG+. For me personally, roguelite fatigue is starting to mirror my open world fatigue. Not EVERY game needs to be a roguelite. I would much prefer a single solid playthrough with a matching good storyline. I'm certainly happy with a 20 hour game, and don't need my dollars to extend for hundreds of hours of entertainment. Now that I've painted that backdrop for you, let me explain why the roguelike aspect of this game is not my favorite. Each time you finish (or fail) a run, you go back to the starting city and can spend your resources on some new units or gear (which gives it a high chance to drop on your next run). Even some of the default canned units you get on your first run sit behind this resource paywall, so you won't see them again on future runs until you pay up. It will take more than 2 complete runs to unlock the full cast, and you can earn additional progeny characters by raising the relationships between specific classes high enough. Each loop consists of the same maps, but you do have options to raise the difficulty between runs. As far as I can tell, the game will simply loop forever after beating it, simply swapping out the final boss and never giving you an ending to the story (Edit: There is a true ending and Prime Dimension you can visit. I think this is ~NG+6). When a game does not have a true ending, you simply need to create your own or stop playing when the game stops being fun. For me, I really enjoyed my first two runs through the game but didn't feel the need to go back in for a third, at least not right now. My second run even came down to a climactic finish, one turn away from blowing it on the final boss with my almost full DPS team. All roguelike features aside, I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys good turn based combat, and recommend playing for the reward of at least one successful finish. The credits are also uniquely fun, allowing you to speak to a full cast of pixel art renditions of the studio behind the game! Personal HLTB: 12 hours , NG+ another 10 hours