1-bit pixel art is an exercise in artistic constraint. A monochrome colour palette, little room for definition and a retro glow that is difficult to pull off consistently – its a challenge. This is what Rogue Sentry tackles and succeeds with, in what is an enjoyable twin-stick shooter. It is a compact title that offers a lot of variety across 81 screens of bullet hell. There’s even a story with multiple endings too.
You’ll play as the titular sentry drone that decides to save humanity rather than destroy but in order to do so, you’ll need to find and release several human prisoners and take down a rogue AI menace. This translates to a simple twin-stick shooter with no bells or whistles to the basic gameplay mechanics. Move with one stick, aim to shoot with the other. You can use the D-pad to shoot t 90 degree angles but I didn’t ever use it as the stick controls worked a treat. Your character moves slower when shooting and you’ll need to remember this because some of the screen designs and enemy attacks exploit this weakness.
Rogue Sentry is set up like a bitesized Metroid title. You are free to explore the prison you want to break your humans free from but areas are naturally cut off by lasers powered by generators. Those generators need to be taken out as boss rooms in a samey order so you’ll be funnelled into a specific path towards completion. What pleasantly surprised me was that each area of the prison focused on something different. One area involved stealth and judging movements based on enemy movement patterns. Another area was all about conveyor belts and moving between them to kill enemies and unblock paths. One of the trickiest areas involved lots of rotating lasers and that felt more rhythmic because of how you need to pop out from a wall, shoot a few times and then duck back behind the wall again before you are killed. Each area comes with a variety of enemies too and often they come in batches with a very annoying laser shot that kills you in a single hit. You must keep moving but it is very easy to walk into something stupidly when four laser shots are firing at you from corners of the room. It gave Rogue Sentry a difficulty curve to tackle but sometimes these laser deaths felt a bit cheap.
When Rogue Sentry shines is in its easy of interaction, clean collision detection and stylised design. Ghosts tell of humans lost. Prisoners you release join you in a conga line and provide additional firepower. You can choose to ignore bits of the story and make decisions for the final boss that provide different endings. Some of these unlock totally new modes and ways to play the game, adding limitations or challenges to the experience. It took me about 4 hours to complete the game first time around and I died a lot. The additional modes add multipliers to that time but I’d expect a speedrun could be done in around 90 minutes if you were god tier talented.
Aside from the odd cheap death, my only other complaint is that sometimes the 1-bit pixel art gave me some confusion. In busy rooms, the scribbled look meant I lost eyesight of enemy fire and had some “how did I die?” moments. Those moments aside, Rogue Sentry offers a tidy, compact and varied twin-stick shooter. It is suited to the retro gamer from its visual and audio design but it brings along lots of modern day quality of life features and approachable controls. It is well worth your time if you have a soft spot for some retro bullet-hell fun.
Review copy provided by publisher. PS5 version tested.
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