Deep Sky Derelicts

A card based, turn based tactical team fighter rogue-lite with some exploration and management. You get to choose a team of 3 characters to explore space ships for loot and story objectives, upgrading them along the way. The art here is probably the games best aspect as you can see in the pictures. The story isnt that awesome and the worldbuilding doesnt impress either. The gameplay works in the following. Each character you have has actions he can undertake based on the cards he has. The cards depend on the gear you have. Each character(class) can wear specific gear. The characters also have stats, that are upgraded through leveling and gear. Sounds good, but the problem is a lot of the card effects are pretty situational. You have way too few cards that you want to use and way too many that you dont need. This forces battles to drag out. Some characters cards are only good in certain sutiations. This is worsened by the fact that you cant switch out party members for explorations. You need to completely remove a character from your party, as in fire them, only then you can hire a new person. Furthermore, since gear is aimed at specific characters, most of the stuff you find from exploration is useless. Then there is the card/stat dilemma. As mentioned, you get cards based on your gear. But you also get stats. Lets say you get a new piece of gear, which is higher level and gives you more stats. But it either gives you more cards you dont want or replaces cards you want to have in your characters deck. This overabundance of utility cards drags out a fight far longer than you want it, but if you stick with old gear your progress slows down even more. Many reviewers say that once you played the first 2 hours, you basically played the whole game. And thats the impression I got after my first 2 hours. Im not willing to try and prove them wrong. The gameplay wasnt fun enough to slog it out. Its not a bad game, but ultimately, it doesnt bring anything to the table.

The drawings are awesome, the potential is huge but it doesn't develop. After a short while it becames repetitive, tedious, boring. The music doesn't help with this, I had to turn it off.

It's actually a pretty good game. Read some of the other reviews to learn what it's doing well, because I'm only going to focus on what I think is a major flaw: the random difficulty spikes. Now I have nothing against hard games, I've played lots of them. There is a difference between challenging and frustrating, though, and a few games are missing this distinction. If the player has no possible course of action to survive an encounter, it's not challenging. So you are on a level 4 derelict, happily slaying monsters and bots left and right with nary a scratch to your squadmates' shields, and suddenly a serpentwurm turns around the corner with two other powerful allies. Together they have easily 5 times the health of your previous encounters, and of course they also wield devastating attacks and abilities that can shut down your whole team. How is that challenging? How is that fun? It's not even a boss encounter, just bad luck with the random number generator. I know balancing difficulty is one of the hardest things in games, but it's also one of the most important things to get right. This would easily be a 4+ star game without this flaw.

Idea is good, graphic is brilliant. But inventory system kills the game. You have to drag weapon/mod on a character and only then see if it can be equipped or not. Same to compare new weapon with equipped one - equip new weapon, see if numbers are better/worse, try to find old weapon in inventory. Considering whole exploration is done to find some loot and get better equipment, inventory design kills all the fun from shiny new weapons and makes game meaningless.

Deep Sky Derelicts is a dungeon crawling rogue-like with card deck building RPG(equipments,loot,inventory,classes and some dialogue choices). Best part is the moody art and nice soundtrack, i can easily lose myself into the weird universe of Deep Sky Derelicts. The negative part is the nature of randomness can feel unfair and brutal at times, especially if you play hardcore permanent death but this is optional. Also i think the final reward for beating the game is bugged and i never got it, developers never fixed it or respond.