Streets of Rogue

It's not every week or even month I get to play a game with "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, nor one of the few games I already wrote about back when I was still mentioning every game I was adding to my backlog. March 2017... how long ago it was that I found Streets of Rogue. Despite the review score, this never really seemed like my kind of game. But looks can be deceiving, and I've been wrong before...

Streets of Rogue describes itself as an action roguelike, but also an immersive sim. An interesting combination for sure, as those are on the opposite sides of the "seriousness" spectrum. Yet, I'd say it's kind of true. It's a rather lighthearted and goofy game. It makes many bad jokes, the missions are often nonsensical, like inflitrating someone's house to turn the lights off, or killing a bunch of people for a banana. Sure, it's just flavor, but this non-serious tone doesn't sit too well with me.
The game has some-dozen floors with a few missions on each. You're offered a lot of different ways to accomplish the missions. Stealth, trickery, violence... There's a lot of different classes, each with a wildly different playstyle, and besides completing the missions, you can scavenge around the level for money, items, and anything else that would help you on that floor or the ones to come. Sprinkle in co-op, random generation, status effects, level-ups, and a lot more, and you have a massive amount of theoretical variety in how the game plays.

Ultimately, the problem for me is that I don't care about this variety. Maybe I find an approach that works, and then I just use that over and over. I find little incentive to improvise some more creative solution or go out of my way to do something different. If you would consider fooling around in these small sandbox-like worlds to be fun, then I think you can get a lot more value out of this game. But if you're like me, and just want to complete the goals the game gives you, it might not be that interesting, as the variety does not actually mean that the game has any depth or is any good at keeping things interesting long-term. So no recommendation from me.