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Rogue Command Review | A Clever RTS Twist That's Easy to Start and Hard to Put Down Feneq Found What Makes RTS Games Fun and Built an Entire Game Around It. Mostly. Life is a Game Magazine Jun 12, 2026 Share Written by Woody Wood I grew up playing venerable series like StarCraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and Dune. These games defined PC gaming for an entire generation. Unfortunately, real-time strategy isn’t nearly as popular today as it once was, but it still has a big footprint in Indie gaming. Enter Rogue Command! A roguelike RTS developed by Feneq available for PC. At first glance, I was skeptical about combining RTS gameplay with roguelike progression. It’s definitely not what I’m used to, and I couldn’t picture how it would keep me playing without an end goal. Never judge a book by its cover, I guess, because it actually works quite well. The sheer variety of units, buildings and perks in Rogue Command offers a compelling reason to keep going with just one more run. The only question is whether you succumb to the repetitiveness that comes along with roguelikes. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Reinvents the RTS Formula Rogue Command does away with a lot of classical RTS mechanics. Instead of a campaign, the game has you complete runs of nine increasingly difficult skirmishes against an AI opponent. Progression is handled entirely outside of gameplay. Every time you complete a battle, you select rewards on a reward map that unlock new units, unit upgrades, consumable abilities and bonuses. And with over 200 units, 100 upgrades, 50 hacks, 30 abilities and 70 enemy units, each run feels completely different. You’ll also unlock new buildings and units as you clear certain milestones. Those units are generally more powerful so that you can progress across runs and take on even harder enemy bases. Every time you beat a run, you gain an ascension level that introduces modifiers to make enemy units stronger, as well as new final bosses. All this variety is what recreates the addictive loop that powers great roguelikes. A lot of the enjoyment in Rogue Command comes from discovering new assets and figuring out how to use them to your advantage. The downside is that luck can play a bigger role than skill. Since your army is built around randomized unit choices and bonuses, you’ll sometimes field a weak army that gets quickly overwhelmed in the middle stages of your run. Fast and Accessible One of the biggest barriers to entry for RTS games is how long they take to get going. Traditional titles often require that players spend a lot of time each match building and researching before the action starts. That’s definitely not the case with Rogue Command. Since most of the strategic decision-making happens between battles, your focus is entirely on gathering resources, producing units and attacking the enemy once the match starts. There are still important tactical choices to make during the fi