PN Review: Roving Rogue (Wii U eShop)

We’ve all had that feeling of forgetfulness, while you’re in the middle of telling someone a story or you’re right in the middle of trying to do something and you stop and think “wait, what am I supposed to be doing again?”. Well this happens to be the plot of a new retro arcade style game called ‘Roving Rogue’ for the WiiU. You take on the role of Kurt, a man who has finished his mission but has no idea how he got here or why he set out on this endeavor in the first place. You must retrace your steps and piece together your memories to figure out your purpose and wherever it is you came from.

Kurt is a ninja but not just any ole ninja, he’s got teleportation powers! Too bad he can only teleport a few feet from where he’s standing. This is your main form of transportation throughout Roving Rogue, sometimes its fun…sometimes its not so fun. You’re able to walk and jump around as usual but teleporting is just so much faster. By pressing the button you’re able to move the joystick to whichever direction you want to go and poof you’re there. You can only go through specific walls while using your power though, that way you cant just teleport through the entire level.

There are more than 40 levels to conquer in this game, and in each level lies 3 pieces of Kurts memory. You can find these randomly placed around each level and a pretty good challenge lies ahead those set on collecting all of them. But spoiler alert, they don’t reveal much. Most of them are just recounted memories of what happened the first time Kurt completed the level. Another weird aspect of this game is a lot of the dialogue in the story is said using twitter posts. They’ll usually pop up at the end of each level, written by you or one of your enemies. I love twitter just as much as the next person but I felt like I would have been more drawn in if the story had been presented a little better.

Visually I really enjoyed Roving Rogue, retro graphics always give everyone that warm nostalgic feeling. I do feel that the level design could have been a bit better, after I while I noticed some repetitiveness. They switch it up a bit by making some levels vertical and some levels horizontal but that’s about as different as it gets. Enemies also seem to be a bit repetitive as well, some of them are actually a bit hard to dodge sometimes though, which keeps the gameplay challenging, but you’ll probably meet your demise falling into a pit or a pool of lava most of the time.

Roving Rogue also includes a multiplayer mode that you can play with up to 4 people, which is actually pretty entertaining. You can either help each other progress or annoy the crap out of the other person, which is usually what most people do. Even though the story isn’t that intriguing and I did feel like I had seen the same stages a few times I did have a little fun while playing this game. If you enjoy these types of retro platformers then id say you’ll get a fair amount of enjoyment from it and if you’re a completionist and want to collect all of Kurt’s memories to see the different endings that are available there’s that as well. Roving Rogue is available now in the WiiU eshop for $7.99.