TL;DR: Try the demo. It's as good as it looks.

Rogue Flight is a dear love letter to Sega's Super-Scalar era of arcade gaming, with 80's space opera anime narrative and keen art direction.

The gameplay is a refreshing throwback to simpler on-rails spectacle shooter the industry seems to have forgotten: you just hop on a killer spacecraft, graze iconic SF scenery at lightning speed, dodge raining lasers, unleash Itano Circus missile barrage, blast bosses' core and have a good time.

In addition to the obvious barrel roll ability, you can also perform sideway drift which lets you whiplash enemies with jet trails (in space, why not) in bullet-time slowmo. It's imaginative and looks awesome, thanks to modern 3D tech. The horizon is fixed by default but if you want it to "roll" for authenticity there is optional cockpit view.

The action is interspersed with anime-like cinematics to carry the Gunbuster-ish narrative. '80s nostalgia is driven home here by stellar voice cast, desaturated celluloid appearance, and VHS-like chroma aberration. The rocking OST by Fat Bard[fatbard.bandcamp.com] with genre-staple wailing guitar is an absolute banger too - it even has a cute theme song!

9 stages may sound a little shortish (I wouldn't have minded a couple more,) but there are various unlocks with plot branches to warrant replays. I feel the real meat is in the New Game+ mode where you have access to all unlocked weapons to match ramped up enemy activity. If you are score chaser there is "RogueFlite" (gauntlet) mode as well.

It took a filthy casual like me ~9 hours to experience everything the game has to offer on normal, and there are higher difficulties with scoring benefits if you are up for it. The post-launch support has been fairly healthy - they have already implemented M&K support, caravan mode, as well as balance tweaks in response to player feedback.

Perhaps the best "feature" of all is that there is no cynicism here. This is a genuine appreciation of a lost form of entertainment, executed with enthusiasm and mastery. It is the kind of well-rounded package filled to the brim with care and respect that is a delight to interact with.

I hope RF will find its well-deserved target audience. Now who is going to be the brave soul to retrofit it in a Galaxy Force cabinet?

ROGUE FLIGHT absolutely OOZES charm and mid-90s nostalgia from every corner. With poppy visuals and responsive controls that manages to keep everything readable and in your hands even in the most enemy saturated segments. Though I sadly found the bosses themselves to be a bit on the bland side; struggling to communicate their scale or really stand-out in any way.

Still I'd be the third biggest liar in the universe if I said I didn't enjoy the game... so there you go... twelve gold-plated space whales out of ten.

If Starfox and Ace Combat had a anime baby.

Very good throwback to classic rail shooter/Shoot 'em up. A good amount of customization and unlocks, a great soundtrack and awesome visuals.

The game is a little short, I was able to run through the whole thing in about 5 hours. There is a "Roguelike" mode, and you are able to go back and replay stages.

Overall a very good game, just wish there was more

80's anime Starfox. Very stylish and visually pleasing with a fitting rock soundtrack for high speed space combat. Large variety of ship customization options flavour wise, decent variety gameplay wise (Though it's mostly upgrades you can choose to specialize in one of the weapons on offer.) The gameplay is fun if a bit simple at times, but that's the genre convention. Very good voice acting for the little dialogue there is. The game is rather short, but it has good replay value. Overall very much a great deal for the low price tag and there is little in this genre nowadays.

A pretty decent star fox style shmup that unfortunately suffers from a lack of variety at times. The core gameplay and visuals are great, the arrow has a really satisfying set of weapons, and a very unique melee attack thingy that i've never seen before. soundtrack is jammin all the time (there's even 2 vocal themes), and special shoutout to all the ship, character, and enemy designs, they're all really cool. The game's variety issue comes in two parts. It's enemy roster only changes by having stronger versions of already existing enemies, meaning you'll have seen pretty much every single enemy type after about 3 stages. The "branching narrative" is less a cool world map where differing mission performance will send you to different stages, and more a linear choice partway through each run where you pick between between 2 easy stages, 2 hard stages, or 3 of the previous with one new one, as well as a 4th "true" path that's just the previous path but with 2 alternate versions of previous stages. I do like the idea but pretty much having to play each of the same stages several times across what's supposed to be unique playthroughs makes the idea feel pretty eh. The ship upgrades are also not the most interesting, doing certain actions/using certain abilities well will give you points towards different categories to get upgrades for your ship's mobility and weapons/shields. At first its a cool choice between what you want to specialize in, when you likely only have significant progress in one/two categories, but the end goal is to just get an upgrade that gives you nearly max power on everything, making the other choices feel pretty redundant. It's also a decently short game, 100% achievements in 4.5 hours (though it's important to note that i'm an unhinged shmup and star fox enjoyer, you'll probably take longer) so your mileage may vary in terms of how worth it the game is for the price. Considering this is seemingly the dev's very first project i'm very impressed despite my criticisms, and the overall vibe of the game still made the $20 feel worth it.

The game is very good but there's a few minus points to it.
- campaign in itself is short so the devs really went a whole lot into making sure the player replay the game multiple times to see all endings and unlock the different game modes, not a problem for me but i can understand that some people don't like that
- around 20€ price tag, reading the game description i can understand why, the VA must have costed them a lot to put in there and honestly only one voice actor sounded like he tried to do his job more than just "ok"
- Crosshair doesn't show exactly where your projectile will hit but just a general direction, so when you think your crosshair is right on the enemy you are actually hitting bellow it or on its side, that should be fixed ASAP honestly

On positive points the gameplay is really easy to pick, just a typical arcade shooter on a corridor like Starfox, the tutorial is more than enough to teach you how to use all weapons and fly then it's just a matter of getting good at it to achieve a better score, visuals are nice the HUD doesn't take the whole screen and let you focus on the action, the bosses all have a pattern you can learn and if you don't pay attention to it the game just punish you enough for you to focus on it without absolutely destroying you right away.

imo that game is worth it on sale, full price is asking a bit too much for it but as i said i guess it's because of the VA cost rather than devellopment of the game itself.

CAUTIOUS RECOMMENDATION The vibes of this on-rails anime shooter are fantastic. The 90's VHS aesthetic, the prestige anime art style, the rock and j-pop music, the genre and science references, the VA direction -- they all make me smile. BUT BUYER BEWARE this game has core gameplay problems and a few control and UI oversights.

First, the game is very, very short. Think like half of the Star Fox 64 map. The devs want you to run the game multiple times and then do a NG+ mode with upgrades, and they let that loop do most of the heavy lifting. I understand it's an indie studio with limited resources (heavens, do I understand that), but 3 hours of first-run gameplay is not enough even at the sale price point. The game really needed a few more levels to justify itself, otherwise it feels like an early access title. UPDATE: I beat the game fully -- including NG+ -- in 7 hours.

Next, the hitboxes on enemies and power-ups are incredibly tight. There's absolutely zero give to bounding box registration, and it makes the shooting frustrating particularly with early weapons. This is improved with upgrades which are spammier, and in first-person mode where the crosshair is more tightly aligned with your shooting vector, but I don't think most people will want to be playing in that mode. That's a mode best left to 6DOF sims.

The menu UI hierarchy is strange. This is doubly true for outfitting the Arrow. It should float new items to the top, but it does not. You have to scroll through the entire list of locked modules to find the new one you've unlocked.

Last but certainly not least and perhaps most annoyingly: if you are playing this game with a wireless Xbox controller, you will run into a bug where even a slight drop in connectivity will cause the whole game to freeze. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Delete several times.

But if all you want is a vibey on-rails shooter and the game is on sale, go for it. It certainly has what I was looking for; just not enough of it.

Just.
Just play the game. Stop looking at reviews of the game. Play it. You know why it was recommended to you.

Bottom line up front.

A short but enjoyable rail shooter done up to look like the space opera anime's that were the best thing about anime from the late 70s-early 90s. Totally worth the 20 dollar asking price if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Now as others have stated in their reviews the unit and level variety leave a bit to be desired and the length is quite short but the game play mechanics are solid and I quickly found myself trying to get higher and higher combos as I played through it.
The voice acting is solid so props to the VAs who provided their talent to what dialogue there is and the overall look and design of the hero ship is quite nice. There is a nice bit of customization you can use in the look of the ship and there is some minor unlocks to let you tailor the ship to whichever of the various weapons you prefer but messing with it isn't really needed to enjoy the game.
You'll also find a difficulty setting which might be needed as on the base difficulty it's not really too challenging.

All and all a full recommend as something to scratch that rail shooter itch if you enjoy old classics like Panzer Dragoon and Star Fox.

I wish Steam had something between recommending a game and not. This is not a *bad* game, but it is not one I would recommend to others or believe is worth its release price of $20.

Flashy presentation but very shallow gameplay and uninteresting enemies. You'll experience all of the game's mechanics in the first 10 minutes, and the story doesn't do much to keep things interesting. You're forced to complete the game four times to see all of it, with the final two runs barely adding anything of note.

Buy it on sale and enjoy a little bit of nostalgia, but don't expect to get more than an hour or two out of it.