Rogue System is a button-studded, checklist-filled space survival sim

ars.AD.queue.push(["xrailTop", {sz:"300x251", kws:["bottom"], collapse: true}]);Last year I was lucky enough to get to sit down in an actual Navy F/A-18F Hornet simulator and log about a full hour of flight time. I was saved from most of the raw complexity of flying the twin-engine supersonic fighter because Commander Matt "Sparky" Smith spent the whole flight crouched outside of the cockpit, handling most of the navigation and communication and management tasks, leaving me free to stick-n-throttle the aircraft just like a video game. Without all that stuff, flying was pretty easy.

I’m definitely missing Sparky on my wing when I load up Rogue System. My assisted flight time in the Hornet stacks up against the game’s fictional FireArc space strike fighter like kindergarten stacks up against college algebra. There are fuel cells to prime, a small nuclear reactor to watch, and space traffic control to talk to—and that’s all even before you undock. The game isn’t anywhere even close to complete yet, and there’s not a tremendous lot to do besides docking and undocking and practicing your rendezvous skills, but everything you can do today in Rogue System is wrapped in layer upon layer of complexity—much like flying an actual aircraft, without the trained Navy combat pilot to handle the hard stuff for you.

That’s not to say that the game isn’t fun—perversely enough, it is fun. For one thing, there’s something intrinsically satisfying about flipping the FireArc’s switches and watching the craft respond to your commands—when you navigate the 80-plus line checklist to take the craft from cold shutdown to ready to undock, you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something. It’s not just the memorization and application of a complex series of steps—that’s part of it, of course, but the game also manages to deliver a feeling of presence that you don’t get even when strapped into an Oculus Rift playing Elite Dangerous. It feels like you’re an integral part of the ship—you’re not just flying it, but controlling it.