Have You Played... Rogue Trooper?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Alec recently revisted Rogue Trooper to take pretty screenshots of Rebellion's cover shooter, so I'll try not to tread similiar ground. It's a third-person shooter based on a 2000 AD recurring story about a genetically-engineered blue supersoldier fighting with the help of his dead pals' personalities living in his helmet, rifle, and rucksack. It's pretty fun! What I'll instead focus on is how I like it makes me create my own ammo, giving me freedom to use the weapons I want.

Rogue Trooper runs on 'salvage', scrap found in handy piles across the battlefield and snatched from dead enemies. Your dead blue bestie in your backpack can handily turn this into new items (nanoforges or something idk), including weapon upgrades and ammo. This is great. If I want to use the sniper rifle and splitbomb mortar while laying loads of micromine traps - which I obviously do - then I can. I'm not flooded with ammo for guns I don't care about. I can tackle the battlefield the way I want to. There's something to be said for certain weapons being rare and special in games, but sometimes it's nice to do exactly what I want as I casually murder hundreds of people.

It's far from the only game to do this, mind, and some do it silently too. Dead Space, modern Resident Evil games, and many others that slip my mind right now will mostly drop ammo for weapons you're holding, which does give a similar effect but doesn't feel like a conscious tactical decision. I like that I chose to snipe and explode everyone (those I didn't sneak up on and knife, anyway). Rogue Trooper's fun enough comic book shootybangs, and they're your sort of shootybangs.