“Deus Ex but tiny and hilarious” is how I pitch the first Streets of Rogue to people in elevators. Then I kick the elevator control panel to pieces, climb out the hatch, and cut the cord with a buzzsaw I smuggled in earlier. “It’s also total chaos!” I yell, as the elevator plummets. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Streets of Rogue 2 is looking similarly chaotic. But one thing has been brought to order: its release date. It’s coming to early access on August 14th, while a new trailer (below) shows horse riding, flame throwing, and speed boating. My favourite moment is when a man pumps magic gas into a room full of people doing zumba, and it turns them all into giants, and they freak out and start smashing the walls in a panic.
Did you catch the guy doing a drive-by shooting from the back of a bear? This is the sort of delightful tomfoolery we can expect of developer Matt Dabrowski, who started making the roguelike sequel partly because adding more and more stuff to the previous game was starting to break things. Here the freedom to go wild is expanded. You’ll be able to build stuff and farm a little cabbage patch, for example. Also, it looks like lots of silly, toy-like vehicles are planned.
“Cruise the highways in style with souped-out luxury cars or goof around in high-speed boat races,” says this blood-caked press release. “Travel through a massive procedurally generated map, always changing with countless surprises…” It makes sense that the maps will be bigger than before. I imagine you’ll need the space for all the zombies you are going to unleash. But the goal is still roughly the same as the first game – take down the corrupt President at the top of it all.
You see, in the first Streets of Rogue you could play as an experimental gorilla and beat a bunch of scientists to death to free your gorilla friends from their cage. You could be a dirty cop and arrest innocent civilians for kicks. You could be a vampire, a shapeshifter, an investment banker with a furious cocaine habit. But you were supposed to be climbing the floors of a towering megacity to face the mayor. I never did hit that endgame, because I was having too good a time elsewhere. Once in a while I’d get a couple of floors further but, inevitably, I’d end up hacking ATMs and annoying the police or accidentally gassing all my friends in co-op. It was the best kind of bedlam.