Roboquest is the roguelite shooter more pairs should be playing
Ask a co-op group which roguelite shooter they play and you’ll usually hear Risk of Rain 2 or Gunfire Reborn. Roboquest rarely comes up, and it should. It’s one of the best first-person roguelites we’ve played, and it’s the game we point people to first when they say there are two of them.
What Roboquest is
Roboquest is a fast first-person shooter with roguelite runs. It’s set in a desert world in the year 2700: a scavenger called Max wakes up an abandoned Guardian robot, and together they fight through canyons overrun with hostile bots. You play the Guardian.
Each run takes you through a series of levels built from a mix of hand-made and random sections, picking up weapons and upgrades as you go. Between runs, wrenches you collect upgrade your basecamp, which unlocks permanent upgrades, so even a bad run moves you forward a little.
Why it’s so good
It’s just satisfying to play. You’re always running, jumping and dodging through bullet-hell enemy fire, and the shooting feels great. Once it clicks, clearing a room feels less like a firefight and more like a stunt.
Lots of guns, and they all have a place. There’s a huge variety, from shotguns and snipers to oddities like a mortar and a flare gun, and they genuinely play differently. What impressed us is how well they’re balanced: there’s no single best gun that makes the rest pointless, so whatever turns up in a run, it’s worth building around.
Every run feels different. The levels branch, so you pick your route as you go, and the path you take changes the run as much as the guns you find. Two runs back to back rarely feel the same.
It rewards speed and exploration at the same time. Each stage gives you a rating, and it rewards a balance of the two. You’re not pushed into slowly clearing every enemy from behind cover, and you’re not pushed into sprinting past everything either. Moving quickly while still fighting and poking around the level is what scores best, and it happens to be the most fun way to play.
Classes that change how you play. Each Guardian class has its own abilities and its own upgrades: one leads an army of drones, one fires a huge rocket, one uses stealth for a burst of damage. Switching class is close to switching game, which keeps runs fresh long after you’ve seen every level.
It has a real look of its own. Roboquest has bold, cel-shaded, Borderlands-style graphics, and the story is told in comic-book cutscenes. It’s high quality without taking itself too seriously, and that suits a game about a robot and a scavenger blasting their way through a desert. It also stays readable when the screen is full of enemies and explosions, which matters in a game this fast.
It’s polished. It spent a few years in Early Access before its full release in November 2023, and it shows. It’s one of the best-reviewed roguelite shooters on Steam.
Why it’s a hidden gem
Roboquest is made by a small studio, RyseUp Studios, and it doesn’t have the marketing or the long tail of word of mouth that Risk of Rain 2 does. But the bigger reason, we think, is the player count.
Co-op is two players only. A lot of co-op roguelite fans play in groups of three or four, see “2 players” and move on. That’s exactly what happened to us: our group is three, so we couldn’t play it together, and it’s the only reason it isn’t in our main rotation. Our 3-player list only includes games that confirm they support at least three, which is how we check now.
Who it suits
- Pairs. If there are two of you, put it at the top of your list. Two-player co-op is what it was built for.
- Solo players. It’s just as good on your own, so it’s worth owning even if co-op nights are rare.
- Fans of fast shooters. If you like games where movement is half the skill, this is one of the best.
If you’re a bigger group, the same feeling is closest in Gunfire Reborn and Risk of Rain 2, both for up to four. Our guide to the games that kept our group of three playing covers both, and the games like Roboquest page lists every co-op game with the closest tags, along with their player counts. You can also see it on Roboquest’s Steam page (opens in a new tab).