The Renegades of Orion 2.0 is perhaps one of the most creative and yet terrible single screen shoot'em ups out there. Most shmups have you as a space vessel, but you are some piece of 80s rock metal album cover artwork sprang to life. I would have preferred a more traditional route, but if you're going to be weird, go so far over the top that you end up in space.

Your goal is to destroy bosses, but the real challenge to the game are terrible controls, poor design choices and giant hit boxes. The arrow keys control move you around in 8 directions, but you are so slow and sluggish. Enemies can move in a full 360 degrees and just aim at you. Under normal circumstances, this is never an issue, but you and the enemies are each so large that its tough to maneuver to avoid them.

The only real attack here is eye lasers that halt you so there's a fight or flight thing going on, but never both at once. You need to get to a corner of the screen, shoot then move as enemies pile on you. When you move there is a chance that your eye lasers will move with you like if you move north, the lasers will move north.

There are other attacks, but the seem cumbersome and complicated. They require two keys and your attack key to work and even then your eye lasers shoot at the nearest small enemy, so there's never a reason to use anything else. Think of that as the game's balance. When you're being rushed head on, your attack does the same thing. If you go to the top of the screen where your head is above the screen and then shoot, nothing happens. The eye lasers are made up of tiny weak projectiles that launch every frame.

The keybinds are bizare. H for save, G for load. F for fullscreen I can understand in a way. The rest is just spacebar and shift.... to pause! When I press F12 to take a screenshot in Steam, a chrome extension for developer tools pops up. That's an interesting feature. I was never expecting that.

The game starts with you one on one facing a boss who summons demons to hover at you. Even from the first moments of gameplay there are issues. At the end of the boss there is a glitch that seems to fire off the same sound effect each frame. Most developers would have the sound once, but whatever.I also took note that at the bottom of the screen you have a giant health meter at the bottom and the boss health meter is a small number in the right corner.

I would say this is someone's first game, but I can also say its trying to be terrible on purpose. Its amazing this game can be 2.0, because as it stands now its cumbersome, tough and over complicated. The Renegades of Orion 2.0 is a valuable way to learn game design at its smallest levels. You have a simple game here and yet everything goes wrong with it.

Perhaps the biggest sin of Renegades is that its just dull and uninspiring. You can laugh at how bad the game is, but beyond that, there's no reason to push on.

On top of the bare bones content of "just play" there is paid downloadable content. There's just not that much of a game here. Its more of an oddity than something that could be confused for entertainment or fun. I was done after a minute of playing, but for review purposes, I had to push on.

The game can be salvaged with some sort of score system to make it more of an arcade game. As a single screen shooter, there just needs to be something that's more engaging that lets me feel like I'm in control rather than fighting a tough game.

Thank you to my friend Blanka for giving me Renegades of Orion 2.0. Hey even if I dislike it, I still thank you for it.

My confusion began with watching the trailer. I watched it three times in a row and still didn't understand, but became obsessed. I had to know.

Even after playing for a little while now, I'm 100% baffled by this game. Its strangely beautiful, the controls make very little sense, the bullets do really weird things. It's a glorious trainwreck and I'm happy it exists.

Have you ever wanted to fly around in the astral plane shooting out triangles from your head in a random direction at medusa statues, spectral bears, and giant sword wielding demons or space dragon boss monsters?

Well now you can. Collect crystal d20's to increase the yellow something meter so you get more triangles or something. And press combinations of V B N Space keys to shoot things out in weird directions while moving with the arrow keys around rippling space backgrounds.

How not to design a game.

To the developer's credit, the art is very nice for what I think they were going for, the animations are good, the sound design is good if we ignore how repetitive it is ( all music is exactly the same, I keep hearing "This world is mine" every few seconds). I'll even ignore the oversized characters and hitboxes, the slow movement of the player character, and the unintuitive controls.

Even then, the game is horrible.

First up is the player's attacks. All of your attacks home in on the nearest enemy, and nearly all of your attacks are just a stream of mutlicolored lights (you can add triangles to it using a powerup- these do a ton of damage and are practically needed for most bosses). But, the "homing on nearest enemy" bit means that your attacks will ignore the boss if any of its endless stream of minions come between you and it. This serves only to frustrate you and prolong the boss battle.

Next is the enemy design. Scroll through the screenshots for the game and see if you can find an orangish-red guy that looks like Satan. Remember what he looks like, because touching him transports you bakc to the previous screen (that means that you have to beat the previous boss before you can attempt the current boss again- repeat for every time he touches you.) and he isn't just fast-moving, but also invincible- you can only wait for him to go off screen. He's just the tip too- there's also a boss that instantaneously teleports around the screen (no warning, no chance to get out of his way, only a ton of damage if you touch him), a boss that will randomly start moving extremely quickly, bosses that are only vulnerable to specific attacks, and bosses that seem to move in and out of the background. Oh, and every enemy projectile homes in on you. All of them.

Finally there is the general clutter. It's normal for a bullet hell to fill the screen with bullets, but this one likes to go a step further and fill the screen with fast moving enemies that occasionally blend in with the background (4th level is filled with enemies that just fly around the area extremely quickly and are hard to distinguish from one another. I got an achivement for killing a boss in this area that I don't even remember seeing), and you'll sometimes find that enemies attacks blend in with the background (5th or 6th boss-I lost count- has two attacks. One is a blue orb, the other is a stream of blood-red teardrops. The background of the level is blood red with some black on the sides. Anyone else see a problem here?).

The icing for this, though, is the developer. The base game is very low on content (based on the achievements, I had two or three bosses/ levels left after 30 minutes of playtime) so the dev releases two DLCs that are the same price as the main game- which is acceptable if they have the same amount of content as the base game (I couldn't get through them, but based on the steam achievements, they do not). Then however, the dev releases the Redux DLC, also for the same price as the base game, and it is basically an update. That's all it is, an update for the projectile behaviour and enemy AI, as well as a new UI. I think you can understand why that shouldn't be a DLC.

Aside from the nice graphics, and okay music there is one thing very impressive I took away from this game. It makes you reflect on what else you could have spent that $2 on, and really makes you appreciate the value of a dollar.

I've gotten this game from a steam key, and the art's really good. Just the fact it's really hard to play. While it is mediocre and has potential, it needs more than just a space backround, and needs polishing and needs to be put in Early Access.

It is hard to tell what is happening, and there needs to be a opening cutscene and better title screen.

So, an overall 1.4/10. Please do not get this game until the developers polish the game and/or remove it and re-release it again.

This is a real mess of a shooter with funky hitboxes, inscrutable (and unalterable?) controls, and boss battles which drag on for much longer than they need to as an unending wave of fodder sucks up your bullets, keeping said bosses alive longer.

I am not a fan.

Game is really weird and has the ability to induce vomiting. First off, the game doesn't have any backstory and is just a person mind blowing balls out of their head against demons (I guess). Secondly, the game has multiple quirks and bugs. If you were to go and mash a bunch of buttons in a corner, the game would send you to the menu. I even closed the game, reopened it and got all the achievements. I have no problem with that, but it sucks when the game has to bug for you to even earn an achievement.

And you thought the Russians refused to provide context for what you are doing in a videogame.

Don't spend $2 on this unless you are a rich man.

don't ask me how i made it as "far" as i did. all i know is it doesn't seem i'll ever get any further.
stuck on the thing riding the cerberus-thing, in front of a black background, with a persistent thing in the middle of the top of the screen, with a thing scrolling the screen every now and then (ninth screenshot on the store page).
that i cannot be more specific undermines the one good aspect of this game: the art. too bad you'll never be able to appreciate it; this isn't a bullet-hell so much as an absolute cluster♥♥♥♥ - there has never been a more appropriate time to use that term.
V, B, and N are your attack buttons, B being the main projectile and th'other characters as modifiers (further, left and right held simultaneously apparently does something, though i cannot tell what), directional keys to move. force and mash your way through the epileptic's bane, completely ignorant, until you lose patience (won't take long). there is no game here, only attrition.
if there was any sort of consistency, there might be something here. the reason i cannot see myself progressing is because every aspect of the game changes every run, down to the speed of the enemies; on the boss in question, it is (as far as i can tell) impossible to avoid being hit immediately upon spawn; cerberus-thing rider moves back and forth across the screen, dipping and arching in what might be an avoidable pattern, would it not be for the fact that while you move, your projectiles don't, only queuing up, to randomly be dissipated and nulled - silver-surfer-sans-board-with-boobs auto-targets the boss, so even if you can get into the groove, you will always take damage from or run into either the boss itself or the minion-things. it is unclear where the "hitboxes" are, not that anything is made clear (aside from the bizarre controls, though, again, what these controls actually do (i.e. the attacks modified with the directional keys) isn't).
the store description claims that there are attacks that can send you back to the start of the level or before that; i challenge anybody to point out exactly which attack it is, as i have been abruptly kicked back despite not being able to see anything hit me (not that any specific thing could be seen through the mess).

shut up game. you are stupid.