Bionic Dues out now, merges robots, roguelikes and corridor roaming

"Hello everybody, a roguelike has just been released," is a sentence that that I could have written on any day of the last few months and still have it be accurate. There's been a lot of them, is what I'm saying. Not that it's a bad thing: personally, I'd rather this than endless waves of DotA-likes or, *shudder* tower defence. The latest is Bionic Dues , from AI War developer Arcen Games. It's a robo-roguelike featuring a seemingly unstoppable invasion and a lot of mechs.

I've only played it for a short while, but already it seems like a remarkably tactical and compulsive take on the roguelike genre. As a lone pilot of four hovering exosuits, you've fifty days to prepare for a full-scale assault on your HQ. Doing this requires you to select missions, which can either reduce the strength of the final assault, or give you better weapons and upgrades with which to improve your EXOs.

Once a mission is selected, you have to stalk through the turn-based mission corridors, killing robots, using special abilities, hacking chests and computers, and carefully trying to navigate the level in a way that gives you an advantage. Also you die a lot, because roguelikes.

Bionic Dues is out now. Normally it would cost £7/$10, but it's 25% off until October 15th.

Phil Savage
Editor-in-Chief

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.