Pylon: Rogue review
A rage-quitter’s dream
Roguelike experiences are often measured by the attention to detail that developers demonstrate when creating and fun and unique experience, along with just how difficult this experience is shaped out to be. Regrettably, developer QuantumSquid Interactive’s Pylon: Rogue experiences troubles on both counts, which ultimately complicates what is relatively a simple dungeon-crawler experience.
The procedurally-generated dungeon-crawler operates easily enough for players to jump in without much of a backstory or narrative. Essentially, the player pushes through a series of rooms in each level, unlocking doors and progressing further by clearing waves of enemies. Rewards and power-ups can be discovered, earned and unlocked along the way, which nicely break up the combat grind, but these don’t always tend to come during the moments when the player is in most need of a particular buffer.
Players are thrusted into the role of one of four playable classes, being The Moneydin, The Rock, The Sureshot and The Stabstress, which essentially perform alike to four standard roleplaying game classes. Three of these classes operate on an almost solely melee basis, which unfortunately presents more than a few issues when taking on Pylon: Rogue’s ruthless enemies. Much of the game’s combat performs in a cat-and-mouse system, where many enemies prefer to attack quickly before scattering away from the player. This forces melee-based characters to rely more heavily on perfectly timing their blocks while landing precise hits on creatures during brief opportunities. The issues become even more noticeable if the player should happen to reach one of the game’s several boss fights, which doesn’t serve as a particularly positive payoff for all of the grinding that occurs beforehand.
The game’s single ranged class deals with far greater problems, with enemies performing the same way but not providing as easy of an opportunity to land blows, as ranged attacks require more precise shots. The opportunity to properly consider these strikes is frequently left to be desired, as players are forced to respond quickly to new incoming threats while setting up their marks. Though the game has been revised since launch to reduce the amount of early-game threats, it can still feel as though the player is quickly overwhelmed from the get-go, eliminating much of a desire to push on and then start things all over again.
Pylon: Rogue very clearly makes an attempt at evening the odds by providing players with particular power-ups as they earn enough currency to purchase them, some of which unlock strange abilities while others enhance the character’s stats. Unfortunately, there are few abilities that prove to be of much use against the game’s somewhat unpredictable assortment of enemies, and the stat improvements are mostly unnoticeable, which will ultimately leave many incoming players feeling relatively unrewarded for their efforts.
Aside from stacking power-ups, players acquire new weapons to wield against foes along their journey, albeit while having to dispose of their old weapon since Pylon: Rogue comes without an inventory system in place. Each weapon has the potential of improving/worsening the player’s attack power and speed, so there’s always a certain risk that comes with trying out a new weapon; one that can either pay off considerably or bring that “Game Over” screen around a little sooner.
While the game’s visuals weren’t entirely disappointing, they felt trapped inside of level and room designs that felt relatively identical during each playthrough, despite the game’s procedurally-generated nature. There was enough life to each location to make it interesting, but the action that inhabited each one ultimately spoiled what should have been a far more satisfying experience.
In the end, Pylon: Rogue just felt like there was an unreasonable amount of difficulty that held it back from showing greater potential. Even despite its simple mechanical nature, the game didn’t provide a lot of incentive to continue the grind through even the first couple of stages. There’s still a lot of room left for it to become a fun roguelike experience, but it may yet take more waves of constructive criticism before fans can expect for things to improve.
Our verdict:
Pylon: Rogue offers an experience that is simply far too difficult to properly enjoy. It may take another wave of updates, or two, before it will provide the roguelike experience that fans will be wanting to see.
Pylon: Rogue was reviewed using a code provided by its publisher.
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