After spending a year isolated on PC, Pixel Reign’s first-person shooter roguelite Moros Protocol has made contact, landing on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2. While more players can now try the game’s grisly sci-fi action, it comes with all of the same issues it had on PC, leading to a fairly mediocre experience.
Moros Protocol is a first-person sci-fi shooter that blends the fast-paced brutality of Boomer Shooters with the replayability and customisation of roguelites. You wake up aboard the Orpheus, a warship floating in the vacuum of space and overrun with horrifying, grotesque alien creatures. With no memory of what happened, and assisted by a mysterious AI called Abby, you explore regions of the ship, clearing out enemies, finding and equipping guns and augments, and collecting resources to improve your stats and skills for the next run. But grotesque aliens are not the only threat onboard the Orpheus, as you are hunted by Jocasta, a dangerous cyborg who seems hellbent on stopping you.
From the B-movie plot to its crunchy, pixelated visuals, Moros Protocol has that fun, borderline silly energy that you’d expect from a 90s action movie or 2000s shooter, and it works really well. The dense pixel art style helps differentiate it from similar games, and I was impressed with the level of detail given to each environment and room, from the blood-splatters on the walls to the large, fleshy mounds filling the corners and hanging from the ceilings. It’s also quite a colourful game, with a lot of the ships’ metallic interiors bathed in blue neon light and a healthy helping of blood red and fleshy pink used to show the spread of the alien infestation.
When you die, Abby transfers your consciousness to another body in cryo-sleep: the basis for the roguelite structure. Each run consists of searching a floor of shifting rooms and corridors for the elevator to the next floor, with each area of the ship you explore broken up into three parts, with a boss at the end of each section. When you find the elevator to move on, you are given the choice of what the next room will hold: more resources or weapon chests, one of several types of robotic merchants, who can sell you new gear, upgrade it, or change your augments, or more enemies for greater risk and rewards. There’s not a lot of variety, but each floor doesn’t take long to finish, and an area is made up of only a few floors.
Where Moros Protocol struggles is with this roguelite system, as the story is very linear and repeats each time you play a region, feeling like your progress is meaningless. There are no other side quests to track or revelations to uncover through multiple playthroughs, and the skill tree you unlock between runs to improve your base stats is far too incremental, with most unlocks having very little impact on gameplay. I think that the game would have benefited from being a more traditional, linear experience, with fewer but more impactful upgrades. While the premise of Moros Protocol is fun, it isn’t enough to carry a game that wants you to keep playing the same events over and over again without even minor adjustments or additions.
The focus of Moros Protocol’s gameplay is shooting various nasty-looking aliens and enemy troopers in the face (or what constitutes a face) with a variety of firearms or slicing them up with your melee weapon. It’s loud, bloody, and can get pretty hectic when you start to get swarmed or have to maneuver through narrow halls or rooms full of environmental hazards. Some of the Oprheus’ larger rooms can have some decent verticality, with platforms for you to jump between and keep your enemies at bay, but I found sprinting around each room and taking my shots when I had time and line of sight to be the best tactic.
You have a stamina bar to manage, and if you get caught out with no energy to run or swing your sword, you can easily get overwhelmed. You also have a health injector to heal a chunk of health when it has a full charge, and you can collect health, ammo, money, and upgrading resources from enemies, chests, and breakable objects in the environment. The moment-to-moment gameplay is where the game really shines, and teaming up with a friend adds to that exhilarating chaos. I enjoyed trying out different augments with various weapons to find powerful combinations, like jumping when shooting my shotgun for extra damage.
Besides the occasional challenge room you can enter to complete a platforming challenge for an upgrade, there isn’t much else to do but search each floor until you find the elevator and move on to the next level. The boss fights you encounter at the end of each area work as a nice, frenetic bookend to each one, but end up being relatively easy because bosses repeat their attack patterns.
What I’ve gone over is what PC players have come to know, but the console port presents new issues with the game, making for a more frustrating experience. When navigating the Moros Protocol’s menus, it becomes annoyingly clear that this is just a straight port of the PC game. I had real issues selecting and equipping gear, with the game needing you to press and hold a button on the augment or weapon you wanted, then using the thumbstick to select the correct slot to equip it to. It’s not the UI itself that is the issue; it’s the inputs required to interact with it that make it frustrating, and it shows that care wasn’t taken to make sure the game was designed with a controller in mind despite the port to consoles.
Final Thoughts
Much like the warship you are trying to survive, Moros Protocol is mired in issues, including new ones brought about by the console port. Its gorgeous pixel art visuals and exhilarating gunplay are not enough to fight back against the onslaught of UI frustrations, boring progression, and a wasted roguelite system, which leads me to conclude that this is one interstellar signal that you might want to ignore.
Moros Protocol is out now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2.
Moros Protocol was reviewed on PlayStation 5 with a controller.
We would like to thank Pixel Reign for the review key.
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