Rogues Like Us

I'll be straight with you: I came into Rogues Like Us expecting a throwaway indie and left having restarted runs more times than I care to admit. This is a top-down hack-and-slash rogue-lite built by a five-person student team out of Michigan State, and for what it is, the core loop lands. You drop into procedurally generated dungeons, swing through waves of enemy constructs and mechanical bosses, grab weapons, enchantments, trinkets, and armor pieces along the way, and then lose most of it when you die. It is that simple, and that loop is where the game lives or dies. The death system has some actual thought behind it. When a run ends, you carry back Ultra Cores to the hub town of Recluse, where you spend them on chests that unlock weapons and armor sets for future runs. Armor works on a set-bonus logic: wear two or four matching pieces and you get a passive bonus, whether that is extra starting health, a shorter cooldown, or a damage bump. You never equip a specific weapon from the hub; you still have to find it in the dungeon, which keeps runs from feeling solved too early. The weapon pool and enchantment variety give you enough permutations that back-to-back runs rarely feel identical, which is the bare minimum ask for this genre and Rogues Like Us clears it. Combat is fast and fairly readable. The low-poly visual style that might look dated in screenshots actually does useful work here: enemy telegraphs stay legible even when small zones pile enemies on top of each other, and boss arenas get a helpful camera zoom so you can track attack patterns properly. There is no damage number readout, which is a genuine miss for anyone trying to evaluate weapon performance, and the story sitting behind all of this is thin enough that you will forget it between sessions. The narrative is window dressing; do not come here for lore. The co-op situation is the biggest functional complaint, and it is a real one. Local co-op works fine on a shared screen, but there is no online multiplayer. For a game leaning on its two-player pitch, cutting out online feels like leaving chips on the table. If you have a regular couch partner it is a solid couple of evenings. Solo, it holds up but the game clearly has more energy in the room with two people. Community feedback also flagged that currency scaling in co-op needed attention, as spending all cores on one character was the dominant strategy rather than a meaningful choice, so manage expectations there. At its price point, Rogues Like Us is a compact, honest product: no padding, no inflated feature list, no pretension. The dev team has gone quiet since launch and a sequel never materialized, so what you see is what you get. If the rogue-lite itch strikes and you want something you can hand a controller to a friend for without a tutorial marathon, this fits. If you need online co-op, ranked play, or post-launch content momentum, look elsewhere.

Fred · Scout Team

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