The game can be basically described as Ace Combat AS A ROGUELIKE! Pick your choice of "Aero" aircraft, equip up to four weapons and one piece of special equipment, then take off from your Airborne Aircraft Carrier for your mission and fly over a randomly-generated island destroying enemy fighters, military facilities, other aerial carriers, naval vessels to rack up scrap and tech points to upgrade your weapons and Aeros as well as unlock new features. But be careful, as enemies will strike back at your ship, and if you die, your campaign progress is lost.
The PC versions in particular have official modding support, allowing players to design custom ships and levels.
Sky Rogue contains examples of:
- Ace Custom: Your Aero, naturally. Aside from being able to select which weapons to mount, you can also buy performance upgrades between missions using the Aerolab, or just give it a new coat of paint.
- Airborne Aircraft Carrier:
- You take off from one at the start of every mission. You can land on it before you've destroyed all objectives to restock your equipment and change your loadout, but you can only do so free of charge once per mission; subsequent landings within the same mission will cost you a hefty amount of scrap. After destroying all objectives, landing on the carrier will finish the mission.
- Enemies also have airborne carriers from which enemy Aeros will launch. You can blow one out of the sky by destroying the four engines on its sides.
- Your Aero can become a small carrier by equipping the Drone gadget, which allows you to deploy lightweight gun drones similar to the ones you've been shooting down all campaign.
- Anti-Grinding: Destroy too many targets (mainly high-value ground facilities) and enemy reinforcements will show up to harass you, likely into ending the mission ASAP instead of just spending all day on the same mission farming for scrap.
- Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: "Warbird" Aeros, which are unlocked towards the end of the tech tree once all other Aeros have been researched, are propeller-driven aircraft in a setting otherwise dominated by jets. They're slow, and their limited Avionics stats restrict their use of high-tech weapons, but they're quite durable, and their dual-mounted weapons fire two shots for the price of one, giving them spectacular damage output (especially against ground targets).
- Boring, but Practical:
- Micro missiles. They have a middling range of 500 meters and their firepower isn't much to write home about, but they can lock onto both air and ground targets and they have low Payload and Avionics costs, allowing them to fit onto almost any build.
- Flares may not be as flashy as boosters or drones, but they throw enemy missiles off your tail, which can mean the difference between life and death especially in later missions when you encounter Veteran and Ace versions of enemy fighters that fire missiles like Halloween candy. Upgrading your Flares to mk3 gives you 16 flares to defend yourself for quite a while and the upgrades are cheaper than those of most other special items.
- The Yumi guided bomb, once unlocked. While it takes up both Payload and Avionics, making it a challenge to fit into some loadouts, and its limited range and ammo capacity makes it less spammable than some other weapons, it's extremely flexible easy to use. You don't have to fly straight and level or Lead the Target to achieve a hit like with unguided bombs, meaning you can squeeze off shots even in the middle of a dogfight, and it does eight times more damage than the other guided air-to-ground option, the Firestorm missile.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": Aircraft in this game are referred to as "Aero" units.
- Difficult, but Awesome: IR missiles. They're cheap and powerful, but they can only lock onto enemy Aeros from behind (and can't lock onto ground targets at all). Making good use of them requires some piloting skill, but their excellent performance makes them quite useful to practitioners of the art of the Old-School Dogfight.
- Fragile Speedster: Interceptor-type Aeros are fast, can turn on a dime, and their high Avionics parameters allows them to carry weapons with excellent tracking capability, making them suitable for getting the jump on enemy Aeros, be it an Old-School Dogfight with enemy fighters or sniping enemy bombers from afar. However, they can't take much damage and depend on that mobility to avoid being blasted out of the sky.
- Game-Breaking Bug: It's rare, but occasionally you may find a catapult that's pointed straight at a hillside, so if you land on it mid-mission to repair and restock, it'll shoot you into the hill and kill you, in an unintentional form of Schmuck Bait.
- Instant-Win Condition: After destroying your objectives, once you initiate the landing sequence the mission is completed, even if visually, your plane lands in an unusual position (say, upside-down) or even falls off the carrier. Also, any enemy weapons that strike your Aero in the meantime will not damage it.
- Jack of All Stats: The "fighter" class. They don't have the speed or high-tech weapons of interceptors, nor the sheer damage output of bombers and warbirds, but they perform decently in most areas and can carry a versatile mix of weapon types.
- Limited Loadout: Your Aero can carry up to four weapons and one piece of special equipment per sortie. Additonally, each item you equip has "Payload" and "Avionics" stats, and each Aero has a capacity for each stat, and the sum of your equipment's Payload and Avionics parameters must not exceed your Aero's stat limits. Weapons with higher power (mainly bombs) tend to have more Payload, while weapons that have better enemy tracking (mainly missiles, especially longer-range ones) tend to have more Avionics.
- Macrogame: Upon dying or completing the campaign mode, you will gain Experience Points towards your Tech Level, and some of your tech points will be carried over. Raising your Tech Level allows you to "Research" new equipment and Aeros for use in future playthroughs.
- Mighty Glacier: Bomber-type Aeros have high Payload limits, allowing them to pack hard-hitting weapons (usually bombs) that can make fine paste of any enemy building at a few presses of the fire button, and more durable hulls to keep them going even after a strong enemy hit. However, they tend to have less powerful engines and can't turn as briskly as fighter-type Aeros.
- One-Man Army: It's just you versus the entire enemy forces. You can downplay this with the L-Drone special equipment, which can launch weaker AI-controlled planes to serve as wingmen.
- Permadeath: Once you die, you must start over with all your upgrades gone. That said, you can also restart the game from certain "checkpoint" days once you reach them, at the cost of some tech points.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Each island is procedurally-generated; no two islands are the same. The placement of enemies, enemy facilities, and the ones that are marked as objectives are also randomized.
- Retraux: The game uses low-poly graphics with no textures other than a few emblems, giving the game the feel of an early 3D game from the late 80s or early 90s, but without the pesky low framerates (provided your PC meets recommended specs).
- Story Breadcrumbs: There isn't a backstory that's available on the official website or as part of an in-game prologue. However, as you unlock new items for viewing in Aeropedia, some of these items will have a short blurb explaining their functions and a little backstory behind the organizations that make them.
