A Mix of Every Popular Idea Doesn’t Always Make a Hit | Rogue Company Review (2022)
Video Games are More than the Sum of Their Parts
Video Games are More than the Sum of Their Parts
This Review of Rogue Company was conducted in 2022. The game continued to live on for several more years after the articles original publish date. Eventually, Hi-Rez Studios cancelled further developments on the game and subsequently shut down the final server on 30 April 2025. In an effort to move all of my writing, I publish this review today. It paints a picture of perhaps what went wrong, before the game got totally canned.
Rogue Company came too little too late. After an evening of giving it a fair chance, it’s clear to me that it was created as a mash-up of every popular live service game on the market right now. You’d think that all the best elements from its competitors would turn out to be a fun and popular game, but strangely, the opposite happened.
Rogue Company looks good on paper, but is ultimately a watered down version of what it’s trying to replicate. It has some weak elements from tactical shooters like CSGO and Valorant. You can feel diluted influences from the big spender battle royales like Fortnite, Warzone, and Apex Legends. It’s also stolen the bones of the Overwatch’s character shooter structure as well. Rogue Company struggles around every turn to have its own identity, and while you may initially have some fun, it didn’t take long for me to realize there’s no reason for my friends and I to return after our first evening giving it a chance.
If you decide to give it a chance, you’ll find that time to kill in Rogue Company is very quick… for veteran players who have invested anything into the game’s economy. Time and money here directly equate to giving players access to an arsenal of guns that new players can’t access, some of which can have purchases of damage upgrades mid-match, ever furthering the disparity between you and them. Rogue Company is not nice if you’re new in town, making it frustrating to ‘pull your weight’ as an active contributor to a team in any game mode.
At the time of writing, if you’d like to try all the modes the game offers, queue times are abysmal. You’ll wait anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes. That’s probably due to its dwindling player base, which is currently hovering around the 1000 active players mark, and trending downward day by day. It’s clear this game is on its way out; I can only imagine why.
Ultimately, these gripes, combined also with the aggressively priced microtransactions, battle pass, and cosmetic skins, make Rogue Company a failed mess that’s not worth playing and not worth recommending. It may be playable (for now) and feel polished. But lined up with its competition it’s trying so hard to emulate, It’s very clear that the cocktail of game ideas that is Rogue Company, is a mixology misfire undeserving of your attention.
Originally published at https://backloggd.com.