The developer generously provided us an early access review key for the game.
Deadzone: Rogue is “a fast-paced roguelite FPS set in deep space”, as developer Prophecy Games puts it. You awaken on a massive colony ship bound for Mars with no memory of who you are and a whole lot of enemies to kill. Deadzone is a rogue-like looter shooter where you die endlessly so that you might become stronger on your next run and something I cautiously recommend at the current stage.
Hope you like this gun check sequence, you'll see it every time you restart.
Rebel Without A Clue
The game starts with the nameless player awakening on a small ship docked with the colony vessel, still orbiting Earth, and no memories. So, without anything else better to do, he takes the elevator down to figure out what’s going on and kill many robots and genetic horrors along the way. The plot is slowly revealed over the course of the main storyline missions and supplemented with crew logs found randomly as you progress through each zone. There's a boss at the end of each storyline mission, while the side missions act as challenges.
Choose your destiny.
There are three zones on the ship, but only two are available at the time of this review. Zone is a nice way of saying, “slightly different enemies and wall textures with some new missions.” In order to reach the next zone, you have to finish all of the missions in the current one, simple enough.
Troubled History
Prophecy Games fails to mention that Deadzone: Rogue is the latest incarnation of their previously failed Starsiege Deadzone title. Although previous owners of that game are getting comped Deadzone for free, this isn’t where Prophecy’s troubles end. Tribes 3 Rivals, another Prophecy Games title, has also been left in an unfinished and sorry state, which is not a good look for a studio trying to win players over. Perhaps three times is the charm? 
Pay no attention to that flop behind the curtain!
Places to Go
The ship you start in acts as a hub for mission selection, upgrading your stats, and talking to Planty. Planty is your best and only friend on this godforsaken vessel. Once you select a mission, it’s time to hit the elevator. Each mission consists of a certain number of sectors, which is a nice way of saying, “arena”. You start with nothing but your dinky little pistol, but some missions will hand you special equipment or perks as part of the challenge. Missions include things like Headhunter, a sniper rifle-only mode, or the dreaded Glass Cannon mission, where you deal loads of damage and start with tons of health, but healing is reduced to almost nothing.
This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
Every sector starts in stealth mode, giving you a chance to scope out the area to see what you’re up against. Stealth mode lasts until you attack, so you have time to pick the best area to kick things off, set up explosive barrels, and see what needs to die first. Clearing a sector gets you a reward; each reward type is shown to you before you enter the room. The first reward is always a weapon cache, and this is the only time it appears. Rewards include perks, items, and later on special elite bonuses. The goodies always come in three, and occasionally the game tosses you an enhanced version of a regular item.
Holding an explosive barrel in stealth mode. You can't have a Mars colony without thousands of explosive barrels.
People to Kill
Aiming is usually only needed for smaller enemies.
A looter shooter is nothing without things to shoot; to that end, Deadzone provides a cast of highly irritating things that all need to die. You get shooting robots, melee robots, flying robots, healing robots, shielding robots, sniper robots, flamethrower robots, and some other kinds of robots too. If that’s not enough, Deadzone also offers non-robotic enemies like flaming skeleton guys in suits that set you on fire, giant CEO clones that want to smash your guts out, and spider cyborg abominations.
Worked himself to the bone.
Deadzone affords you one primary gun, one secondary, one melee weapon, and one grenade. Primaries are where all the fun weapons are, like the snipers, shotguns, and miniguns. Secondaries are mostly pistols, SMGs, and a few smaller shotguns. Melee is limited to a fast knife and a slow axe. Grenades are grenades, but at least you can’t blow yourself up with them. Aside from that, you also get a handy dashing ability, which is great because your normal move speed is slower than molasses. Dashing works on a cooldown, which can be upgraded with tech or altered with modifiers from gear.
The Iron Squires. A pair of unique SMGs that deliver fast damage and a high elemental proc rate, but USED to drain health for every shot (when I took this screenshot). Now, they increase spread instead.
Enemy composition determines how you should tackle a room. For example, healing and shield drones make it almost impossible to kill anything being protected by them, so they have to go first. A sector with nothing but spider robots that explode into a vortex should be approached by letting them all come to you from a distance, when possible. However, some missions, like Uniform Chaos, will randomly select rooms and enemies, and some combos are almost impossible to survive. I had a bridge with no cover and a room full of guys with shields and heavy guns and died within seconds of stepping out of stealth.
A healer drone. End it faster than a celebrity marriage.
A looter shooter is nothing without things to loot. Enemies drop scrap and tech when they die, or rather, it comes bursting out of them like a piñata. Scrap is currency; it is spent at the safe rooms for upgrading and buying new equipment. Tech is for upgrading your stats between runs. Sometimes enemies also drop weapons and armor.
It's easy to make quick comparisons with new gear and old.
Take Five
After so many sectors, you’ll reach a safe room. This one safe place provides limited healing and a chance to spend all of that scrap you’ve been accumulating. The replicator lets you buy new junk, upgrade old junk, and purchase one or two health kits if you’ve taken a massive beating. Every piece of gear has ten levels of quality and five levels of rarity. Each level of rarity adds new affixes to your weapons that do everything from steal health to reloading your unequipped gun when you kill something. You can reroll your affixes several times, and there’s a perk that lets you gain additional rerolls. Rarity levels can be upgraded one time, but there’s a perk that lets you do it twice too if you’ve found the perfect gun that you can’t part with.
The agony of choice.
Big Shootas
Deadzone’s armory offers something for everyone: sniper rifles, shotguns, axes, knives, etc. What you end up using the most is usually determined by what perks you pick, and this is where you get to define your playstyle. RNG takes a guiding role, and you won’t always get what you want, but adaptation is part of the game. A good example is the perks that extend your magazine size and provide bonuses for every round missing in your mag. This is ideal if you intend to use assault rifles or the minigun, provided you can get your hands on one. If you’re lucky, you’ll get an item that extends your magazine size even further. If you’re very lucky, you’ll also get an elite item that boosts your damage for every round you reload. There are also perks for getting up close and personal and ones for improving your melee attacks.
In the future, tea leaves will make your guns do more magical fire damage. There's also hot sauce, pop-up toasters, and loads of other magical bric-a-brac.
All weapons beyond common rarity have an elemental damage type affixed to them. There are four types of damage: fire, ice, electric, and void; each element has two types of effects. Ice-based weapons do shatter, which is an AoE explosive ice effect (I think, the game is a bit vague on some of them) and freeze which coats enemies in ice and slows them down. Void can trap enemies in a singularity, holding them back for a time, or summon up void tendrils to attack nearby enemies; you get the idea. The bad news is that several enemies come packing the same kind of elemental attacks, so expect to get slowed down in ice, flung about in vortexes, and set on fire. As near as I can figure, there are no resistances or weaknesses to elemental types, which means you can choose fire-based guns without any fear of them not working properly on fire-based attackers.
Picking Perks
Perks define your character, and the first one you choose has the largest impact. There are perks for close-range combat, long-range combat, and the aforementioned magazine booster. Beyond that, you have slots for three other perks with branching upgrades. Once you choose a perk, it’s locked in, no take-backsies. The smaller perks include boosts to health, shields, elemental damage, melee, or a handy robot companion who will attack enemies and draw their fire.
Choose wisely, they grow with you and there's no respec.
Elemental perks will enhance the damage and special effects of your weapons. You can only pick one of these, so choose wisely. Upgrading your fire perk will let you set enemies ablaze with damage over time. Upgrading ice will let you choose a perk that surrounds you with a blizzard effect. You get the general idea. My personal favorite is ice, since being able to freeze and slow down enemies tends to enhance my survival chances, but like I said, you don’t always get what you want.
Getting Killed Getting Stronger
The only thing certain in a roguelike is death, and you will die, over and over and over again. Dying ends your run, and you wake up back in your ship with nothing but your pistol again and whatever tech you managed to scrape up. Tech comes in two forms: the generic currency needed to upgrade things to their next level and the parts for each specific tech. You can have thousands of tech points, but they mean nothing if you can’t upgrade what you want.
Look at all this dopamine!
Upgrades come in three different flavors: Tech Masteries, Superior Items, and Synergies. Each one is unlocked as you arrive at a new zone, so you start with Tech Masteries and get Superior Items later on, with Synergies currently MIA along with the third zone. Ideally, the more upgrades you get, the farther you’ll go before dying until you can complete the zone, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Co-op
Imagine all the fun you might be having. Because that's all you'll ever do.
You tell me. After countless attempts at fixing my problems, including contacting Prophecy’s tech support, I could never, ever get Deadzone to log in through Steam.
The Definition of Insanity
The first few hours of Deadzone are fun enough, but once the novelty fades, you’re left with room after room of monsters with some slight alteration on the theme of destruction. At about fifteen hours in, I’d already tapped the available content, and while I could ratchet up the difficulty, all this will do is reward me with more tech at the end of each mission. The third zone isn’t available yet, so there’s not much motivation for boosting myself any further when I’ve seen all that Deadzone has to offer at this point. I’m not sure how much more content Zone 3 will offer or how far Prophecy Games intends to take Deadzone. One should keep in mind that this studio has a fairly poor track record so far for finishing games.
Get ready to see this, a lot.
Deadzone itself is fun, but there’s a major frustration in losing the run to something stupid. The much maligned Glass Cannon mission was toned down, and it’s still ridiculously difficult; I had to turn it down to easy to get it done. I’m sure that Deadzone has more entertainment value for those who can enjoy co-op mode, but since I could never get it to log in, I have to enjoy it as a single-player game.
Conclusion
Deadzone is decent fun for those who enjoy the repetitive, “get stronger with each run” style of gameplay, though I wouldn’t call it anything special, and potential buyers should be aware of the studio’s history and the general caution of buying an early access title.
