Broadside Renegades

I gravitate toward the small Steam pages with hand-drawn thumbnails and a solo developer credit, and Broadside Renegades is exactly the kind of release that quietly deserves more eyes than it gets. On the surface it reads like another auto-shooter in the Vampire Survivors lineage: pick a captain, collect coins from downed enemies, choose randomized weapon upgrades at level-up, and survive escalating waves until a danger meter that never stops climbing finally buries you. That loop is familiar enough. What sets it apart is what sits underneath. The combat here asks more of you than most horde games dare to. Your ship's auto-fire handles the baseline damage, but each captain also carries an active ability that demands real aim and spatial awareness. Positioning matters in a way that feels closer to Starsector than it does to most top-down survivors. Speed management changes your turn radius, which changes whether you survive the next thirty seconds. The starter ship is a deliberate, broadsides-first brick that wants you to angle your flanks toward enemy clusters rather than kite freely, and it takes a few deaths to internalize that friction. Unlock the rail gun ship and the whole feeling shifts: a vessel that tears through enemies in a straight line, stops cold to transform and fire, then relies on a shield ability and hit-and-run spacing to stay alive. The high-agility option goes further still, with a 180-degree flip and dodgeroll that turns engagements into something approaching a stunt reel. Each unlockable ship is a different game inside the same game, which is a genuinely hard thing to pull off solo. Between runs, a meta-upgrade layer adds persistent small gains like extra HP or movement speed, keeping early losses from feeling totally punishing. The pixel art is crisp where it counts: ships and enemies read cleanly against backgrounds that reviewers have compared to painted canvases rather than tile sets. The original soundtrack earns its own mention as something genuinely atmospheric, not filler. Four enemy factions, over thirty ship types, and distinct territorial zones including asteroid fields and defended planets give each run a sense of geography even without a map screen. That said, there is no tutorial to speak of, and the coin-and-indicator system is not explained well enough to not frustrate players in their first couple of sessions. Smaller enemies can occasionally spike damage in ways that feel arbitrary rather than earned, and the sound mixing has had some rough edges the developer has been patching actively since launch. The honest answer to "is this worth your time" is yes, with a caveat sized to your tolerance for learning by dying. The developer is visibly engaged, the feedback loop between ship variety and weapon synergies has real depth for such a compact package, and the whole thing is priced at a point where skepticism costs very little. This is the kind of game that a certain type of player finds and quietly logs twenty hours into before anyone in their friend group has heard of it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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