Moros Protocol – A brutal roguelite that keeps you coming back.
In the past ten years, roguelite games have become very famous. They include everything from 2D dungeon crawlers to top-down shooters. But while there’s been a lot of variety, not many first-person roguelites have been able to strike a good balance between fun loops of gameplay and rewarding long-term growth. Moros Protocol is a pixel-art first-person shooter roguelite that came out in September.
It’s not made by a big studio; instead, it was developed by a group of people who really wanted to combine the look of old games with the gameplay of new roguelites. What may have begun as a retro-style first-person shooter quickly turned into something deeper, with features that encourage trying new things, making progress, and exploring. Another roguelite? No, Moros Protocol is different. It stands out in a crowded field.
In Moros Protocol, you play as the last person left alive. An unknown AI helps you find your way through a huge spaceship full of monsters. At first glance, your task seems simple: clear the ship’s sectors by beating bosses and getting rid of the corruption that’s spreading through its halls.
Scenes and mood make up for a lack of speech in this story. The story moves forward with stylish but quiet scenes between each boss fight. In one duel, for example, you’ll face an enemy with a sword, and in a cutscene, that enemy will always hit you, telling you of how important the fight is.
In another, you have to avoid big cubes that are smashing into the arena, which makes me think that something went wrong with an experiment on the ship. The lack of story or voice acting in Moros Protocol is a shame. Its mysterious turns could have been much more powerful if the story had been told better.
Still, the stories about the environments and boss fights are enough to keep you interested. In roguelites, short-term upgrades during a run are paired with long-term growth through permanent unlocks. This is how Moros Protocol works. At the start of each run, you are given a simple melee tool, like a sword or an axe, and health that controls your ability to hit, dodge, and jump.
You can charge melee swings to do more damage, but dodging uses up energy, which is necessary to stay alive. There are two types of ranged weapons: physical (like shotguns, pistols, and rifles) and energy-based (like plasma rifles and shock cannons). It’s rarely a problem to run out of ammunition because enemies drop lots of refills.
Exploration takes place in randomly chosen rooms that are linked by teleporters. Moros Protocol doesn’t use pure procedural creation; instead, each room is made by hand and has a random mix of enemies, items, and dangers. This mix keeps things interesting while keeping the quality of the design that was carefully chosen.
Two kinds of currency drive growth. The first gets boosts from in-run vendors, which can make your damage, stamina, or even the timing of your dodges trigger grenades. The second is a constant resource that can be spent in the hub on a grid of upgrades. These range from more health and stamina to more ammo and more slots for augmentations. That “good grind” that you get from every bad run in a roguelite makes the next one better.
The best part of Moros Protocol is the fighting. Every fight feels random, and you have to balance close combat, long-range shooting, managing your stamina, and positions. When you enter a room, the doors stay locked until you’ve killed all the monsters inside. This makes every fight feel like a mini-survival challenge.
The fighting in close quarters feels heavy, with satisfying cuts and powerful finishing hits. Ranged fighting, on the other hand, really benefits from having a lot of different sounds. Powerful shotguns, accurate pistols, and satisfyingly loud plasma weapons all make a lot of noise. Battles feel more real because of the blood, blasts, and targeting weak spots.
There are sometimes platforming parts that break up the fights. Some rooms have tricky jumping puzzles that give lasting stat boosts, like more health or stamina, to people who figure them out. These parts are nice because they add variety, but Moros Protocol’s small field of view can make them annoying. I missed a jump or the right time for a platform more than once because I couldn’t see well enough.
Boss fights are, without a doubt, the best part of fighting games. With nine different bosses, each fight requires quick thinking and quick reactions. One boss fires deadly lasers all over the field, so you have to time your jumps just right. Someone else drops things from above and crushes anyone who hesitates. These fights not only test your build, but they also show how creative Moros Protocol is. They’re hard, but never unfair, and playing them with a friend makes them a lot easier to handle.
It’s clear what’s good: fighting feels great. To keep you on your toes, the mix of close and far weapons hits hard and lets you dodge quickly. Each run is different because progression augments let you stack crazy combos, like a lightsaber and a perk that doubles damage after every kill, which makes normal enemies easy to kill.
The bad thing? Dead bodies that are sometimes cheap and are often caused by the field of view. It’s easy to get hit by strikes you didn’t see coming in crowded arenas or narrow hallways. Co-op also has problems. When a player respawns, they are thrown back into the fight right away without any protection, and they can die right away. An easy-to-beat amount of time would fix this.
There are also bugs in co-op, like doors that won’t open, plan choices that don’t match, or rooms that won’t load properly. Because of the currency carry-over method, these bugs didn’t undo any progress, but they did make Moros Protocol less fun to play.
The two-layer progression method in Moros Protocol is what makes it stand out. Augments make a huge difference in how you play during runs. On one run, you might be trying to avoid perks that drop grenades. Next, you might be building melee multipliers to deal devastating damage up close. This short-term variety makes sure that each run is different from the last.
The grid of upgrades that last a long time adds a rewarding meta-progression loop. Even runs that fail give you something that makes the next ones easier, like more life, stamina, or bigger ammo pouches. Fixes that last a long time, like small speed boosts, may seem small, but the steady feeling of progress keeps you interested. It’s the best example of the “just one more run” effect.
Pixel art graphics drawn in first person are used in Moros Protocol, which seems like an odd choice at first. It does work, though. The old style makes you feel nostalgic without making it harder to see what’s going on in battle. The enemies are horrifying and recognizable, the guns are packed with detail, and the pixelated explosions make the violence even worse.
Still, the graphics don’t always match up with how intense the game is. Arenas can feel suffocating at times because of the small viewing area and the way the space is laid out. Still, the art direction does a good job of making the rocket both creepy and strangely cute.
The music is especially good. During intense fights, pulsing beats play in the background, and in quieter parts, ambient hums are used to build tension. The sounds of all the weapons are great: melee hits have weight, gunshots crack and boom, and energy weapons hum with satisfying charge effects. The story would have been much more complete with co-op voice lines or AI talk, but the sound design, as it is now, still pulls you into the action.
This is the kind of roguelite that makes you want to play for “one quick run” and then you can’t stop until 3 A.M. Its fighting is intense and addicting, and the boss fights are some of the best I’ve ever seen. The gameplay loop is always exciting, whether you’re cutting enemies with a charged sword, blasting them with a plasma gun, or stacking silly upgrades.
It’s not perfect. The field of view makes it hard to use platforms, recovered players are unfairly weak in co-op, and bugs can be annoying. Sometimes permanent changes aren’t very exciting either, since they only give small bonuses instead of game-changing benefits.
But none of that is more important than how much fun it is. Moros Protocol is one of the most fun roguelite FPS games of 2025, whether you play alone or with other people. This game might not be as polished as a AAA title, but its heart, creativity, and fun-to-play style make it a secret gem that you should check out.
