Deadzone Rogue is a mishmash of different video game trends crammed into one. So if you’ve gotten your fill of first-person shooters, rogue-lites, co-operative titles, or role-playing games, Deadzone Rogue might not be for you.
However, it grew tendrils and shoved them into my brain, and for the last 20 or so hours, I’ve fallen for whatever the game is putting down.
The game’s moment-to-moment gameplay is what has me in its vice-like grip, but it does have a fairly intriguing tale to tell. It descends rapidly into a sci-fi nightmare, as you uncover the truth as to why you can’t die and why androids have taken over the ship.
As the game is a rogue-lite, dying in a mission will result in a full reset, and you’ll be forced to go through it all over again. Split into different zones, there’s a story mission to complete that unlocks a variety of different quests to accomplish. Between runs, there’s an upgrade system to spend earned points on. After a few hours, I was convinced that I’d seen everything by the time that Zone 2’s story mission wrapped.
Deadzone Rogue Encourages the Hunt for the Spice of Life
However, going back to the side missions to see what they had in store unveiled a game that deeply understands what makes it work. Some of these missions dangle a carrot of an unlockable weapon that might appear in your next run, or remix how enemies appear. My favorites were the ones that forced you into a particular style of play that you might never actually do otherwise.
For instance, one mission had me exclusively using a sniper rifle, despite the fact that I find the sniping in the game awkward. The game is built of generated rooms of either short corridors or small skirmish arenas. There’s never much room to snipe, and it can make movement feel clunky at times. It never generates a room that I felt unable to escape from a bad situation, but Deadzone quickly becomes very samey.
Once you’ve done ten runs through one particularly hard mission, it begins to become a little tiring to see the same layout or room style pop up. Excellent for efficiency, bad for making fights interesting. This said, I do enjoy the general look of the game, but it can absolutely be drab at times. There’s a room that always pops up in Zone 2, snow and ice, but it’s like this one solid block of ice, blue and white. Every time I’d enter the room, I’d feel my brain glaze over.
Changing Things Up
As the game progresses, it introduces new styles for each zone, distinguishing them from one another in a real neat way. Zone 3 is a little more horror-esque, while Zone 1 is a fairly basic sci-fi aesthetic. This also pertains to the various gameplay elements that are in store.
Zones 1 and 2 are fairly similar in scope, but Zone 2 mixes up what enemies you’ll encounter. It’s got a theme of being irritating, with a lot of freezing you in place attacks to deal with. However, by the time you get to Zone 2, you’ll have unlocked the special item reward at each healing room. These just ever so slightly tweak the way you play with passive abilities, and also highlight a huge love of mine in the game: fast progression.
I’m here for a good time, not a long one. While I suspect I’ll probably spend at least 50 or so hours in Deadzone Rogue when all is said and done (until, presumably, the game updates with more stuff), I’m thankful the rogue-lite progression is fast.
I’m not talking like, you’ll be done before Zone 2, but I’m working through Zone 3 now and having maximum health, shields, and damage out of my weapons as soon as I enter the fray is pretty nice.
Deadzone Rogue Gameplay
I can’t stress the comparison to titles like Call of Duty. Deadzone Rogue feels like buying a new style of your favourite pair of shoes.
While not overtly deep, I never felt out of step with the game. Deadzone flows especially well, even if the movement isn’t as fluid as other games. There’s a small dash and a very slight double jump, as darting between enemy fire and getting to better vantage points becomes a must.
You can get the jump on enemies before initiating combat with the stealth mode that activates whenever you enter a room. This lets you survey the landscape and take down as many enemies as you can before they swarm you. At some point, it became apparent that some of the enemies aren’t particularly smart, so running down a hallway and blasting until the numbers stopped popping off them became a valid tactic.
Deadzone Rogue does offer a wide variety of guns, but it never goes off the rails in a way that I’d expect. Despite being a rogue-lite FPS where you shoot lightning out of a gun, there are no big whacky guns to get into. A side mission introduced a pair of dual SMGs, but aside from pumping 60 rounds into an enemy in a split second, it’s never “silly”. That said, I never felt bored with the options handed to me.
I really liked how encounters rapidly teach you about each new enemy you’ll come across, so you know how best to deal with them next time. It never takes your hand and pulls you to the side, favouring the approach of letting you get dunked on by some horrific spider monster.
That’s Not Fair
The enemies in the game aren’t particularly difficult to deal with. While it takes a lot of inspiration from modern shooters, at times, it feels like they played one too many retro shooters. Deadzone Rogue has this weird problem in some of the maps where it’ll create problems for you through annoyances.
Tiny spiders that freeze you in place as you’re swarmed by raining machine guns and six enemies stabbing you. While there are plenty of options during normal firefights to escape the madness, in these bum rush situations, it feels almost impossible to get a handle on it.
A glut of enemies that trap and destroy a run simply because I happened to get caught up in a flurry can be a real mood killer. So much of the game is carefully constructed around ensuring that you can always get away; it’s like a sucker punch whenever the game decides to flip the table.
Deadzone Rogue is Great on Handhelds like the Steam Deck
If you’re looking for a time killer for your handheld PC, like a Steam Deck, good news! The game performs just fine at around 45 fps, and is pretty smooth the whole way through.
I believe the most recent update will have taken away the ability to change settings on the platform, but using FSR upscaling will give you a decent boost in performance.
On the Ayaneo 3 with an HX 370 and 32GB of RAM, after applying AMD’s upscaling with FSR and setting the game to low, it ran at 60fps while at 1080p. For those with a Z1 Extreme device like the Asus ROG Ally, you can squeeze the game to 60fps by playing at 720p on low.
Deadzone Rogue is an expertly put together game from a team that clearly gets the gist of the genres its pulling from. Fast-paced and intense, with a huge swath of options to unlock and experiment with, I can barely put it down as it scratches the “one more turn” itch just a little too hard.
Score: 4/5
| Pros | Cons |
| Familiar and thrilling gunplay will get most players instantly into the loop | Generated rooms can get quite samey |
| Fast-paced RPG elements make upgrading less of a hassle | Downright drab at times, even as the game opens up later on |
| Tons of variety and combinations | Annoyance and overloading enemies don’t equal difficulty |
| Each zone feels fresh and unique from each other | |
| Works well on PC handhelds |
Platforms: PC
Developer: Prophecy Games
Publisher: Prophecy Games
Release date: October 10, 2025
