Rogue Aces

Rogue Aces is a stellar, fresh experience - even more so if you never played spiritual forerunner Wings of Fury - that has landed on the Switch eShop seemingly out of nowhere. It not only delivers an audio-visual treat but also an overwhelmingly entertaining stimulation of the senses thanks to the frenetic aerial ballets you will take part in. Easy to pickup but devilishly hard to walk away from, Rogue Aces demands just the right amount of arcade shmup skills and strategic planing with the odd lucky break when something just works out. All of this is complimented by some excellent humour in the form of audio quips from your Captain, the enemy Baron aces and the one-liners from ally pilots. Kick the tires and light the fires, fellow Switch pilots; this war won't be winning itself with you sitting pretty on that carrier deck.

I enjoyed Rogue aces gameplay and satisfying explosions, and the variety of multiplayer modes on offer. And its solid controls mean you can jump right in if you are playing modes with auto-land on. However, it did not take long for the experience to become repetitive because of the extended campaign mode and lack of varied missions. Finally, the landing mechanic made arcade mode inaccessible to me as I could not master landing, even after spending half an hour in the tutorial trying to get the hang of it.

Meshing together the repeat play appeal of the Roguelike game category with a fun light-hearted take on airborne dogfight warfare, Rogue Aces is a joy to play and comes packed with a great deal of content. Newcomers to the genre will find some turbulence in adapting, and the multiplayer potential of the game's setup both online and off isn't realised at all. But for pure arcade fighter jet action on Switch, few games are more enjoyable.

Simple yet very addictive arcade title with funny airplanes, several game modes and explosions.

Rogue Aces is a cracking little game that’s great fun and has plenty to do. Its graphics and sound design are decent but it’s the addictive gameplay hook that will keep pulling you back for “just one more go”. It’s perfect for portable gaming, so its presence on both the Vita and the Switch is very smart thinking by the developers. So while it’s still fun on the big screen at home, its short play design loop makes it an ideal purchase for the commuting gamer on the go. Plus it’s less than a tenner so what are you waiting for?

There's little doubt about it, Rogue Aces is a very enjoyable game, and one of the best and most entertaining Switch games within its price range. Controls are hard to master to begin with, and impatient gamers will need to be more lenient with this game and give it time. If you do allow it time, then Rogue Aces rewards you with high-octane thrills and spills from start to finish.

A lot of 2D shooters lean on being "cool" with over-the-top visuals and millions of bullets on-screen, but Rogue Aces instead goes for a lighter tone and places the emphasis squarely on the oldest, most reliable thing in the video game industry: perfect play control.

An interesting propoosal that manages to be different to any other game on its genre while still being fun. It's a shame that the fun doesn't last longer...

Rogue Aces is a fun little indie game tied to a decent progression system. It suffers from repetition but offers excellent controls that help mitigate some of its flaws.

While there are elements of Rogue Aces that work well, and I can appreciate the effort put into setting up some variations with multiple modes, I also found it better suited to short and moderately-long play sessions over long ones. A periodic break helped to keep it all from feeling quite so repetitive. Aside from the challenges with landing I think the balance strays too quickly to the extremes rather than having a tough but more fair sweet spot in the middle. Either I’d have a run in the Normal Campaign that ran long and felt too easy or I’d go to the Frontline Campaign and have significant leaps in difficulty by about the third island. There are some fun and crazy moments to be had like the first time you jump from your damaged plane into the cockpit of an enemy fighter to give yourself a new lease on life, but in the end there’s not all that much variety. If you’ve been itching for something that feels very arcade-like, this can be fun, but if you were hoping for something deep it doesn’t fare as well.