StarCrawlers

I personally love games like this. It's an earnest effort by a small indie team dat clearly has a passion for what they're doing. You can tell that they had a vision for what they wanted the game to be and stuck to that, instead of becoming distracted by feature creep or half-baked ideas. This makes for an enjoyable game to play, with a satisfying gameplay loop that will carry you through most of the game with ease. This core gameplay does not really vary from beginning to end. All missions aside from story missions are randomly generated from three or four tile sets and an equal number of enemy sets and objectives. By all accounts this should get repetitive pretty quickly, but somehow it doesn't. The game's atmosphere, soundtrack and whimsical style makes it a relaxing, pleasent experience that doesn't really get boring. It also helps that the game is well paced, giving you a boost in power (through gear or skills) just when things start to feel samey. Even the main story, while not the game's focus, is well-written and entertaining. I do have some criticisms. Mainly that there aren't enough secrets, hacking seems mostly irrelevant and the main story has same nasty difficulty spikes. But for a game with this much heart, I don't mind. This game is enjoyable and one of the few I played for more than 40 hours without getting bored once (which is very rare for me).

The game is more focused on managing factions than on the tactical fun. At a certain point you're going to have to really upset a faction, and when you do unbeatable enemies suddenly start showing up to pound you. Seriously, there's a "shield" mechanic, but overpowering bad guys have a magical shield-like system that's not shields, but works like shields and you have to destroy their pet "hounds" that project the shield-like shields on top of removing their shields, but that same mechanic isn't available to you. That's what you get for "succeeding" even though you can barely find enough medkits and healing abilities to keep your team from dying on a mission. Just to afford medkits you have to raid an enemy faction and auction off their secrets, but that drives up their "hatred" of you until they start sending the unbeatable mercenaries. So, fun for the first several hours, and then the game becomes unwinnable, unless you play the factions just the way the developers want you to, and you're pretty limited in that as well. If you support this faction, then you must upset that faction. You can't upset a faction too much, but the missions are randomly generated and so you end up having to upset one faction too much and the game sends you nigh-unbeatable opponents. On Linux, you MUST disable the free-look and set it to only work on right-click. Otherwise all the clickable stuff when crawling is offset in random directions and unclickable. Apparently it's a Unity/Linux conflict. Other than that, it runs solid and smooth.

I'm shocked that this isn't more popular or talked about. This game has some good personality. I never played a game exactly quite like this before, and I'm happy I did. I wanted to get to know the characters better, but I feel like I couldn't explore this as deeply as I would have liked. I wanted the campaign to be longer. It felt kind of short, but it was nice. I really recommend others try this one out. I got it when it was on sale and I have no real regrets about it. It's just a decent solid little purchase and It was fun and enjoyable. The videos and images on the game page here before you actually buy it really don't do it justice, and the game surprised me a little when I finally got into it. It was a refreshing experience, but I will admit that it wasn't exactly my type of game. That being said, I enjoyed it very much. If you like science fiction video games that are all "weird move like a chess piece dungeon-crawly turn based strategy combat" then this is a pretty good one. In all honesty though, the role-play felt pretty weak. I wanted to get to know everyone, including myself so much more but it doesn't go all that deep. There's some space-opera type space politics based decisions going on, which is cool and everything, but I would have liked to take a step back from the endless side quests and seen what it was like for my character to take a vacation or interact with the space station or their home area. Like I said, it wasn't exactly my exact type of game (even though I love science fiction stuff) and the vision the developers had was clearly meant for an audience that I'm not 100% a part of, but do share interests with. That's obviously just my opinion, but hey. I mean, all things said and done, I'm very happy I played this. When the game was over I was left with this wishy-washy so-so feeling, like I felt like "yes I did it!" but at the same time I wanted more and was left with plot paranoia but it was awesome! would recommend to others! 5/5.

I have this on Steam. I've been playing blobbers since the 80's. This is the best one I've ever played. It's not open world like some (Might and Magic) but the story and characters are *vastly* better, and the combat feels more engaging. The paths you can take in the plot branch and branch and branch and your actions have weight. Do you spare an enemy? Do you steal that piece of tech? Do you choose to steal these medical supplies from a colony? Your actions will all shape how the story unfolds. Plus, it's straight scifi! Not only are your own characters given personalities, but even the enemies feel like they have personality. Most have a small blurb written about them. More amazingly, the corps you work for can all be contacted, talked to, and explored. They each have their own interesting liaisons and the corporations themselves all have character of their own. The best part is that it's all fun and engaging to read. The devs have a great sense of humor and a good eye for characterization. If you want an RPG with choice and consequence, secrets to find, and a fun and enfgaging story, get this. It is worth *more* than full price in my opinion.

StarCrawlers is a nice dungeon crawler with its own flavor and charm. The story is nice and interesting and you can side with three different groups, having three different endings, so there is replayability value here. The problem is that story missions jump 2 or 3 levels each time and then you have to grind. Grinding is part of dungeon crawl games, but boy, the grinding here can get tedious. And you are always wanting to skip it and go to the next story mission to see what will happen. Loot is RNG dependent and can take a while for you to get good gear specific for your builds. Also, each character has 3 different skill trees and you can respec your points paying some cash. Music is nice too, nothing amazing, but do its work of immersing you in the game.