 You know what I love? A good challenging roguelite with RPG elements in combat. Just look at my playtime in Darkest Dungeon, 132 hours. Is that not impressive? Is it not ever so slightly worrisome? The lesson I've drawn from that particular obsession is I am very eager to crush the itch left behind by my refusal to replay Darkest Dungeon yet again. In the early axis of Darkest Dungeon 2 might as well be ages and ages from now, so what the heck? Might as well give another title from the Xbox Games for PC catalogue a try. In this one, check some of those roguelite RPG boxes. Star Renegade is a challenging game, and its pixel graphics are done with such care, such attention, calling them beautiful is no great stretch. And it is even good. But after dying four or five times or normal before finishing the game even once, I find its roguelite elements have begun to brighten me. To the point I'm no longer certain I'll play through the game in the expansive way I'd need to in order to make a review of it. A note then, I haven't experienced everything this game has to offer, I haven't played with every single character, I haven't finished the game. That said, let's chat about it for a bit. What's good about it? The longer you survive, and it's not difficult to survive at the beginning, the deeper the combat runs. It's fairly straightforward to start with, your characters only have two abilities and you only start with three of them. As you go further into a run, you get to have up to six characters in your party, and the number of abilities you've got access to by this point is, well, quite a lot more. Complexity does grow exponentially as you progress further. The narrative is mostly bare bones, with the exception of an amazing animated cinematic which made me nostalgic for Saturday morning cartoons. It's got that energy of a 19th sci-fi cartoon, a dark tone and a bunch of stuff that hints at, if not story and drama, the necessity of lore in the game itself. The conversations between characters themselves are more comedic, lighter in tone. And they do have small interactions when their relationships deepen as they camp and bond with one another over killing late tenants and boss monsters, but there is no variety between what two characters share. They'll have one in the same conversation from one parallel dimension to another. Oh yes, that's how the game explains its repeated randomly generated runs. You, in the role of an adorable tiny robot, continue to fail and occasionally succeed, something that never happened to me, only to jump onto the next of an endless number of realities. What do you fail at? You fail at saving the universe, basically, from an evil empire. Sound familiar? Anyway, you jump from one reality to the next in order to try and stop this evil hierarchical empire over and over again. The different words you have access to come with their own tiny bits of expedition. And an increasing catalogue of enemies, including a single encounter with different factions working for the empire per world. What drew my attention to Stara and the Gates originally was the application of one of my favourite systems in recent time. Or rather a stripped-down version of it, the nemesis system of Shadow of Mordor fame, where each enemy has a certain personality. That's anywhere from real scary to absolutely loony tunes. Now, between writing this video and recording the audio, I actually saw a video by Game Maker's toolkit, which speaks of the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system, and turns out that Monolith, or rather WB Studios, the gaming division, that is of Warner Brothers, actually has patented this system, which is insane to me. Anyway, that might be a reason why the system is stripped down in this game, and in other games that it has seen limited use, such as the late Assassin's Creed titles. At any rate, I play everything with the nemesis system you see, because it offers the promise of a nice layer to your bad guys, and I've always thought it's held much promise for games with heavy RNG elements. Of which Stara and the Gate is certainly one. What this game does is, if you get killed by one of these lieutenants, they get leveled, they get tougher, they jump into the next reality, and you get two exact sweet sweet vengeance on them. None, however, came back from the dead after I was done with them, which is only reasonable, I suppose, very few of us have an evil overlord not only willing to rule over all life, but also willing to cheat death in order to bring us evil lieutenants back. I do find the game pushes you towards a citizen style of tackling every world. You're forced to do away with every lieutenant because you have a very limited number of actions in the space of three days. You can access three zones a day, nine zones in total before the big boss of each world appears. And if you want to get as much experience as possible, you can only do so by fighting each and every lieutenant. Because, predictably, they bring in more experience. Further, this is one of those games that uses an affinity system of weaknesses and strengths. Again, in the vein of the nemesis system, as well as in the way that games such as Persona 5 do. Like Persona 5 again, Starr and Gates refuses to use these weaknesses in boss battles. That, I'm afraid, is endlessly frustrating because at that point the tools you have that the game itself has taught you to utilise are reduced considerably. Your arsenal is hobbled and that results in boss battles which are unsatisfying, extra difficult and us log. Not a happy, happy time to be had, I'm afraid. In that case, should you play Starr and Gates? I don't know. You tell me in the comments down below. I think I am done with it after maybe 12 hours. But who knows, I cannot see in the future. It is a blank map. Or a piece of paper, even more blank. Or maybe it's a charcoal bl- anyway, I will see you next time. And yeah, please don't forget to like this video, share it with your friends, subscribe to my channel and stay tuned for more on books and games and possibly stuff in between. Who knows, I'll see you again next time. Bye!