Gory pixels with bullets and melee. This roguelite bloodbath is filled with FPS action as you fight out aliens on a spaceship. From hidden rooms to boss fights. The music in this one will keep the heat pumping in late-night clearing sessions.
I absolutely enjoyed the pixel art in Moros Protocol. It’s dark, gory, and a lot of fun. From the way bugs go splat when you kick them to alien sacks on walls dropping loot. Some of the hallways I'd clear out would just be dripping in alien guts and blood.
Sometimes, after clearing a floor. I’d just go walking around to check out every gory detail I had missed in my rush for survival. Sometimes I'd even find loot I missed out on the first time around. Other times, I'd find little details that make exploring the ship just a little creepier than you were expecting.
As you enter each room, it goes into lockdown. With you needing to kill anything that dares to move. While some of these rooms are traps that could end with a quick death if you are not paying attention. Others have great spots for dodging attacks, running around, and getting the upper hand.
There are also some objects in rooms that you can destroy that deal some short-term area-of-effect damage on the ground. Allowing you to further leverage your surroundings to do all the work for you. Assuming you don’t take damage yourself from doing so.
There is also a great advantage to ensuring you have explored every square inch of a floor before moving on to the next. From there being sacks on the ceiling and walls to shoot that drop loot. There are challenges and even hidden rooms to find as well.
A bit part is just running around, looking for upgrades as you explore each floor. Chest rooms are nicely marked. Making it a little easier to navigate the random layout of any floor you find yourself on.
It did not take long before I started to have favorites when it came to certain kinds of guns over others. While I gave the shotgun a try a couple of times when I got it. I preferred having pistols. One for each type of ammo, so I could switch between them when I was running low on one type of ammo over another.
The challenge room offers a short jumping puzzle. Sometimes, there are moving platforms where timing your jump moment is critical. Other times, you must make jumps that almost seem impossible. Failing just resets you back at the start, with an option to leave the challenge room if you want to give up.
The reward is a small increase in health or stamina. So, it’s not the end of the world if you choose to skip over these rooms. They are quite limited with their usually just being one between the boss sections of the ship. If this is the kind of thing you don’t find fun in a game, it can be skipped over. They are, however, worth the time, even more so early on, to give you a slight advantage that is often needed.
There is also a hidden room on at least each floor, as far as I can tell. They offer a bit of risk for reward. There are these disgusting holes in the wall where you need to use physical damage to break the sack inside of them. While there are many of these on each floor, only one opens to a hidden room. Doing so causes some health damage to you.
The hidden room itself could have everything from chests to just a couple of loot sacks. Along with some other interesting things as well. More often, it’s worth taking some health damage to open them up and find these areas on the floor. It sure comes at a cost of health, which, early on, can be a bit challenging to manage.
This is not the only risk-to-reward offered in the game, either. As you progress to each floor, you must pick a route. Some paths might offer an extra weapon chest in the area. While others, such as lights out, increase the overall rewards.
This can make or break a run early on. You might select to go down a path for a certain kind of vendor. Only to realize once you get there, you lack enough credits to even buy anything from them in the first place.
Other times, you find yourself not getting the loot you needed to take on the challenge of the path you went on. RNG plays a huge role in each run. Some runs I've found myself racking in rewards, and others I'm struggling on just a couple of health remaining.
There then comes that moment on every run, you hit a boss you know you just stand no chance at taking down. These things can be quite deadly, with you only lasting a couple of hits if that, so try to work out a strategy for fighting a certain boss.
At least before the boss room, you do have some last-minute preparations that can be done. There are some chests to restore ammo and maybe even a little bit of health. If you were not managing your health to be near topped off before entering. You'd best already have a decent plan in place. Otherwise, it’s a quick death and the end of a run.
The nice thing about roguelite is that while most of your early runs will end in your swift death. It was not without getting something out of it. You end up getting some points you can spend on a tree to gain a slight advantage in health, stamina, and armor slots, among other things.
While I do wish some of the possible upgrades in the tree were a bit more powerful. As a lot of them just repeat themselves, like getting two more health points. Just at a higher cost, the deeper into the tree you get.
There are at least some important upgrades along the way. Having more starting red cards for opening doors and slots in your armor can help a lot. Not all of these upgrades are that important to you early on. As you are just looking for more health and healing to last a bit longer each run.
I had quite a blast going on quite a few runs in Moros Protocol. The music and just pure gory pixel graphics of this game kept me wanting to go on just one more run. It was hard to put down, even more so once you start to realize you were missing out on something in your early runs, and now each run is far better, including any upgrades you have unlocked along the way.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Moros Protocol.
Disclosure: A review copy of the game was received for free.
Disclosure: This content is based on playing a version of the game before its release.
