Rush Rover by radio, indienova, and Ratalaika Games is a top-down roguelike shooter with bullet hell action. Learn more in our Rush Rover review!

 

When you start the game, you have the choice between Arcade Mode and Dodge Mode. As you start Arcade Mode, you will be placed in a safe room, and you have a hint window that indicates the different controls for the game. You move around with the left analog stick and shoot with either the R2 button or the right analog stick. The L2 button allows you to perform a dash move. The Square button opens up your inventory, the Triangle button the map, and the X button is used to activate the different upgrade pods you encounter while playing.

Once you know your controls, you’re off to another room where the action will start. Upon entering a room, there’ll be a few robots waiting to try and destroy you. In the first rooms, said robots will be pretty small and won’t shoot a lot, but as you progress, they get bigger, pack more moves and shoot more bullets. You will also eventually encounter rooms where there are bullets or laser beams coming out of some walls to bump up the challenge.

 

Killing enemies and destroying certain boxes on the map will give you some of the in-game currency so that you can purchase some upgrades to the different parts of your rover. Each part has a certain number of possible upgrades that cost a little bit more after each purchase. If you end up dying, you’ll be back to square one with nothing left of those upgrades.

 

The first thing I noticed when I started the game was how few details we were given. The button mapping was it, as there’s no proper tutorial section, so you just move on to the next room. I then started blasting some robots, eventually gaining a few upgrades and blasting some more robots. I got to a room with a different challenge since instead of shooting robots, the challenges involved to survive from the bullets coming at you for the longest time possible. After surviving in this challenge for a bit more than a minute, the three trophies related to dodge mode popped, and then the Platinum trophy popped as well. I was 26 minutes in. A few rooms later, I died, and starting back from the first room, I didn’t see any reasons to continue since I had the Platinum trophy and no specific goal other than kill more robots.

 

Final Thoughts
Rush Rover is fun in terms of gameplay. But the way it only involves killing robots with no story and progress, and a Platinum that’s obtained incredibly fast, it doesn’t give you a lot of reasons to go back to it. You’ll get a Platinum trophy (double that if you have a PlayStation Vita), and have fun obtaining it, but it won’t last long.

Disclaimer
This Rush Rover review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by Ratalaika Games.