StarCrawlers

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As a fan of the Legend of Grimrock games and Vaporum, I jumped on StarCrawlers as soon as it was out of development. For the first dozen hours, I really enjoyed the sci-fi take on the genre, the writing, the unravelling plot, the turn-based combat, character skills and synergies, the way different classes and character backgrounds open up unique encounter solutions, hunting for gear across a myriad of environments, and trying to understand the faction mechanics. StarCrawlers is at its best when you're exploring the lengthy story missions, full of interesting encounters, plot details, unique locations, the ability to piss off or befriend a faction, and some decisions that affect future missions. You can swiftly tackle a few of the infinite sidequests to gain some character XP or gear, before moving the plot forward again. The opening hours have a great sense of progression, with new skills and gear unlocked swiftly. Unfortunately, progression slows and combat becomes a slog about halfway through the game - around the same time you'll start to notice the repeating environments and crave more puzzles/secrets over combat. Story missions are well-balanced for their recommmended level (unlike the side missions), so you'll need to grind more and more to keep up (the final story mission, of 12, is almost at the level cap). Combat, despite being turn-based, lacks intensity. Unless you're tackling a mission well below your level, combat is a slow, low-damage affair, which requires chipping away at increasingly large health pools (which your characters also posess). Spamming and synergising skills is the optimal way to do damage but even then, later battles can take upwards of 10 minutes each. With the turn order visible to the player, I expected high-stakes combat that required target prioritisation to avoid damage but, sadly, StarCrawlers is lacking. In summary, fun for a dozen hours but the combat becomes a slog long before the end of the campaign.

What I hoped for: A gritty sci-fi RPG with meaningful character development, engaging locations, and thoughtful turn-based combat. What I got: After 5 hours playing, I had had enough of my unadventurous crawl through four different dystopian residential / workplace buildings, full of exhausted Marxist sci-fi ('wage-slaves' etc.) and tired game-play. The game may be independent, but the thinking behind it is not: there is not a mechanic or an idea that doesn't feel borrowed from another game, and the result is expectedly uninspiring. The character creation screen was arguably the most exciting part of the game for me. There's a good variety of interesting classes, from Lovecraftian magic builds to engineers who focus on pet control, and a promise of a diverse universe. However, under the sheer bulk of discordant and inaccessible information, character progression petered out into meaninglessness. I'm familiar with RPGs boasting spreadsheets of statistics to sink your teeth into. There's no gravity pulling the numbers together here, just a large spread of functions acting independent of each other. Like stars separated by the vacuum of space, classes feel unconnected. When it comes to damage types, status effects and move sets, the combat is a breadth v depth affair. You'll be fighting lots of the same enemies, who do lots of the same things, over and over. I lost touch with the moves I was choosing - it was all so repetitive and formulaic that I could win pretty much every battle and leave with full health on challenging mode. Nothing forced me to adopt new tactics or rethink a situation. I love Phillip K dick, I love Ursula LeGuin, I love Isaac Asimov, I love sci-fi. The setting here is just uninteresting - loads of greedy corporations (I cared about none of them) plundered by you, the guy who doesn't play by society's rules. And how are you going to do this? By exploring similar looking randomly generated office blocks over and over. Meh.

StarCrawlers is insanely addictive. Beginning as a lone Crawler (an adventurer in space clearing out shifty runs for megacorporations), you hire a team of excentric classes such as a Cyberninja or Void Psyker. Each class has brings its unique style to the gameplay, and more importantly, its own personality in dialogues and dialogue options. The setting is full of puns and tongue-in-cheek, but the writing is unexpectantly good. The story of the Stellar Marin - a seemingly abandoned giant spaceship where everyone just disappeared - provides the red threat through the game, and quickly becomes the center point of three very different political factions vying for information, control and your team. The political agenda is excellent. Dozens of megacorps vye for your favour and vice versa, and any of them make excellent allies and even more dangerous foes. You can't make everyone happy, just make sure you choose carefully who to annoy, and how much. For me, the best things about the game are the clever writing, the great options and being a key political player in a world that makes a lot more sense than initially expected. But the gameplay is solid as well. The combat system is astoundingly complex, and timing of skills and order of enemies keep most battles fresh and fun until the very end. Starcrawlers is my unexpected highlight of this quarter.

Starcrawlers is solid grid-based dungeon crawler with mostly procedurally generated levels and items and surprisingly good story. Second half of the game gets a bit too grindy and grinding with turn-based combat is really boring. I would always prefer smaller maps designed by person over poorly generated repetitive giant ones. Overall Starcrawlers is worth playing especially if you like dungeon crawling and/or cyberpunk.