Thanks to ArcenGames for the Steam review copy!

Read our review for the Starward Rogue base game here.

Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED is a large gold-tinted expansion to the underappreciated 2016 rogue-lite. The base game was fantastic on its own with decent run variety, a large amount of enemies to attack, and plenty of characters to choose from.

Starward Rogue was lacking in a few areas. Late game of each run was always pretty repetitive because there were only 2 or 3 high tier weapons and you always had a high chance of finding at least one of them. Runs could feel very similar to each other due to being able to consistently find the same items. Due to the nature of the game I had eventually seen every room type and enemy type several hundred times. While a lot of these issues are due to my absurd amount of playtime, when I learned about the game getting an expansion, I was excited and ready for more of a personal all-time favorite.

AuGMENTED comes out and includes a chance for gold-colored floors to appear and includes 3 new characters, 90+ new items, 30+ new enemies, and over 125 new rooms to fight in. To say the DLC is large is understating it.

Golden floors provide a completely different item, trap, and enemy pool. There is little to no overlap in what you can find on golden floors versus normal floors. The item pool lock is a bit frustrating to me because a lot of gold floor items seem to be stronger than normal floor items (such as invulnerability chance and many strong weapons), but luckily you will usually find at minimum one gold floor once per run.

The new traps are a bit different from the usual spikes and lasers of the base game. Golden floors now have pulsing squares on the ground that hurt when glowing red, traps that drain your secondary weapon ammo, and ones that make you take double damage. While these trap designs are all a bit more interesting, a seasoned player would find most of them to be quite a lot less threatening than what normal floors have.

While the traps on golden floors feel like less of a threat, the enemies are the reason the DLC feels like a difficulty increase. The enemies are aggressive and shoot complex bullet patterns that don’t have range limits. There is a spherical enemy that has several orbitals you have to kill before you can get to its core. A ninja-like robot enemy comes after you with lightning-fast speed. It doesn’t help that some rooms have pipes for enemy bullets to travel through resulting in screen wrapping bullets. Not to mention the golden variant of the Warden boss fight that I still don’t fully grasp how to dodge. You have more careful than usual on the golden floors, and the majority of my failures occur there.

Like with the base game, most of the new player mechs simply start with different items and stats with a perk. However, a couple of the new character editions are notable. One of those notable mechs is the Alpha mech. The Alpha mech’s level upgrade pool is fully randomized instead of upgrades being locked behind specific levels. Meaning stronger upgrades like an all stat increase that would usually show up around level 6 can show up at level 2. It provides some incredible run variety, although the set back is that the mech is very frail starting with 2 health. The Paladin mech is my other favorite new addition. It starts with a melee weapon and a shield. The shield needs to be aimed and is treated as a secondary weapon (uses energy as ammo that regenerates each room). You can swap out both of these items but neither weapon spawns inside a normal run, making the Paladin the only melee character.

Starward Rogue: AuGMENTED is a fantastic DLC that does nothing but improve the 2016 shooter. Due to the difficulty increase it provides I would recommend some experience with the base game before purchasing, but if you want more Starward Rogue, the AuGMENTED DLC satisfies with no morality changes.