Deadzone: Rogue is a first person shooter roguelite that sees you blasting your way through a space station full of robots and gross cyborgs. Deadzone is in a genre that has plenty of competition, but manages to stand out by placing an emphasis on its different game modes.

Each run in Deadzone starts by having you select an area - there's three to select from, with them getting progressively harder and more complex as you go along. Each zone has a "standard" run with multiple difficulties, and a ton of different challenge runs you can pick. These runs often have really fun modifiers, like forcing you to pick a short-range perk and making all of the enemies melee, or forcing you to use a unique weapon during the run. These modifiers actually add a ton to the game and I really enjoyed how wacky or unusual some of them got.

Deadzone's gameplay consists of what I'd describe as a roguelite take on Borderlands. Weapons and equipment drop with different levels and rarities, and usually have an elemental typing. Completing floors offers you a choice of a new perk, like increased elemental damage, melee damage, bonus shields, etc. This is made more interesting by having you pick one run-determining perk early on, three major perks, and then minor perks that are associated with the major ones (ex. selecting the lightning damage perk will give you minor perks that can improve your lightning damage's critical hits, or your lightning arc damage).

The gunplay itself is pretty tight and satisfying, generally speaking. Expect to see your usual weapon classes (assault rifles, snipers, pistols, shotguns, and so on), plus dashing and typical enemy archetypes. Despite the fact that nothing here is too groundbreaking, it's still a lot of fun to run-and-gun your way through the game's different areas.

The downsides I've found with Deadzone aren't too significant, but you'll likely find them as you play on. Often times, I find that certain gameplay styles are much stronger or much weaker - taking the perks that require you to ADS to gain your perk bonuses can be frustrating against melee enemies, whereas the hipfire perks almost always seem like a great choice. Lightning seems to be the strongest element by far, especially with high rate of fire weapons late in the game. Enemies can occasionally corner you in weird ways in the geometry and you may find yourself dying to melee enemies piling on you (especially if they have the ice element, which freezes you in place and/or slows your movement). Lastly, there are some metaprogression elements, which I often dislike because it makes the games artificially more grindy, but they're decently well paced here.

Overall, I recommend this one! I got a solid 20+ hours out of the game, and for that time, I'm pretty satisfied with it. I'll probably try to play some more on the harder difficulties in the future.