Star Renegades Review
As if to make up for last week’s relative calm, this week was unquestionably nightmarish. In a parade of misery, America was bombarded with horror after horror, including incidents that ranged from the National Guard trying to deploy sci-fi weaponry against protesters to reports of mass sterilization in ICE detainment facilities. Not only that, but it was revealed that the increasingly fascistic American government took steps to radically over-penalize protesters, advance racist historical revisionism in schools, prevent the testimony of a key witness into ICE misconduct in Texas, and downplay the effects of COVID-19 by blaming political opponents. Like the last few reviews, I can’t think of a clever or meaningful way to transition to talking about games, but I must anyway, so let’s talk about a group of rebels Quantum Leap-ing to try and battle a seemingly all-powerful army.
Star Renegades tells the story of the titular group of soldiers as they attempt to fight back the invasion of a pan-dimensional cyborg army known only as The Imperium. As the game opens, the world has ended. With the entire planet aflame from the Imperium’s attack, a hopeful scientist named Professor Zurek sends J5T-1N, an adorable robotic sphere, into a parallel reality to a time before the Imperium invaded. J5T-1N, and now the player, is tasked with locating the Professor’s parallel self and gathering a ragtag squad of guerilla fighters to stop the Imperium’s invasion before it can start. Woefully outnumbered and under powered, players must lead a strike team of disparate combatants to intercept the Behemoths, the Imperium’s monstrous super-weapons, and turn the tide of the war.
The first thing I want everyone to know about Star Renegades is that it is the hardest game I’ve played this year, which makes sense considering the game is about fighting against an army that has the resources of an infinite number of conquered parallel realities. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, I just think it’s important to keep in mind for the rest of the review, because it has a big impact on what most players will see. I think the best example of this is a subject brought up in the game’s trailers and opening video: apparently, the Imperium has the capacity to reconstruct fallen members of the Renegades as subservient parodies of their former selves. I have no idea if this is true, because I am routinely obliterated by the end of the second of the game’s four levels. The fact that it might be true is one of the major reasons I was and still am interested in playing this game, but after about twelve hours with the game, I’m beginning to get frustrated. Another good example of the limitations the games high challenge level poses is that there are over a dozen characters, some of which require the player to maneuver the inter-personal relationships of the Renegades so that they end up procreating, unlocking a new playable character in subsequent time lines. Much like the Imperium’s hypothetical grim mockeries of the Renegades, this sounds awesome to me and I am eager to uncover this feature, once I figure out how to keep the Renegades alive for long enough to form romantic interest in each other.
While challenge is neither positive nor negative, Star Renegades does have a few flaws I found frustrating, and the chief offender is how unintelligible the game can be. In any given battle, players might have to keep track of damage types, attack types, weaknesses, resistances, immunities, and stat modifiers including being enraged, slowed, hamstrung, and more. The way players keep track of this is by looking at up to three different screens, one of which isn’t actually available while the Renegades are in a fight. The game makes noble effort to make some of this less arcane with some available tool tips, but the fact that I had to regularly stop multiple times and check whether my Valkyrie’s sword was doing laser or fire damage or to check if my Saboteur was losing health because he was bleeding or on fire drove me up the wall. Worse, if a player wants to check what effect any of these conditions or terms mean, the game’s tutorial is one of the most unwelcoming I’ve seen in a while. To answer any question a player has, they must first deduce which entry to check, because a vast majority of them have the title “Combat Basics” followed by a Roman numeral. It’s almost hard to believe this level of obfuscation being accidental, because it’s difficult to think of a less useful way to categorize important player knowledge.
Another problem I have with Star Renegades is the characters and how their personalities are conveyed. The first issue is that the characters are represented outside of combat as two-dimensional portraits, which is extremely common in games and not a problem on its own. Where it got on my bad side is that these shift and jiggle in a way that’s not quite three-dimensional but too much for 2D. It’s like a weird pixel-based motion comic, a medium almost no one uses and even fewer people like. If the developers really wanted to have characters have facial expressions and move their mouths in conversations, I think they would have been much better off by creating multiple portraits of each character with each one expressing a different emotion instead of having to figure out how to make a two-dimensional picture move in three dimensions. On top of this, the personalities the characters try to express are very ill defined and poorly communicated. Most of the insight into any Renegade’s personality is learned either in the game’s camping sections or interactions with specific points on the game map. However, the camping dialogue stays on screen for maybe one second at a generous estimation so players can barely read them let alone reflect on any nuance. During the interactions on the game map, the remarks characters make are usually taken from a pool of communal lines, which leads to moments where a swamp-dwelling big game hunter robot has the exact same opinions on alien religion as an academic-turned-black marketeer. I feel like this game started out with more generic, interchangeable characters but the developers decided it would be better if the Renegades had unique personalities, but didn’t have enough time or money to get it done right.
Though I’ve been pretty negative so far, I do like some parts of Star Renegades. For one, this game is cool. It might not be high art, but a soldier in a big robot suit wielding a preposterously large sword is rad and makes me smile. The same is true of the cheerful robot priest using his faith in computer gods to throw a meteor onto a battalion of Imperium soldiers. And it’s fun to upgrade the Renegades with items like the Colossus Core and Ravager Circuits. A slightly more concrete complement is the dynamism present in the game’s combat system. Most attacks used by both the Renegades and the Imperium inflict some amount of “stagger,” which pushes the target of the attack a number of seconds equal to the stagger down the round’s 60-second timer. I had a great time with this because it was fun to bash an enemy into inaction by having my entire squad dogpile them. It also provided the same kind of rare challenge I saw in XCOM: Chimera Squad, where I was balancing killing Imperium soldiers with managing their ability to fight back. Lastly, though I had difficulty capitalizing on the game’s camaraderie system present during the camping sections, I thought it was cool that Renegades would gain perks once they were friendly enough with each other and that the perks were reflective of the person they had just gotten closer to. It’s great that the of benefit getting closer to the sniper robot was an increased capacity to penetrate armor, while being friends with the tough guardian gave a bonus to shields.
I sort of feel bad for being so down on Star Renegades because I really like the core of it. Unfortunately, the idea of a reality-hopping squad of desperate but awesome revolutionaries taking on an unimaginably huge empire of robot monsters is overshadowed by frustratingly opaque, overly-complicated, under-explained mechanics and poor artistic decisions with the characters. I think if this game were $10-$15, it’d be an easier recommendation, but at $25 I suggest waiting for a nice discount.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
