StarCrawlers

Rating: 4 out of 10 Nothing is particulary bad in this game, but nothing good enough to make this a good game. Pros: + interesting setting (Sci-fi/Cyberpunk) + different factions + boring hacking mechanic has been replaced Cons: - fighting the samey enemies over and over with samey skills/abilities/classes - random generated dungeons are generic - music by Ben Prunty is not bad, but does not fit

The exploration and tactical combat is enjoyable on each mission exploring dead ships and fighting monsters and mechanicals. The optional data jack combat is similar although I found the loot from those missions to be lacking and did these more for the information on the map or to disable security measures. The story is good and reflects which corporations you side with although I the perks weren't good enough. There is a problem that the story missions jumped in level requirement so you must doing regular missions to get strong enough - if you enjoy the exploration and combat anyway these are not grindy but I certainly don't recommended binge-playing this game all day. There are certain levels that feel like roadblocks where enemies suddenly get much stronger or have a lot of armor/shields. At first I thought it was lack of decent weapon from a loot drop but plenty of drops occur although finding that special one that clicks is pure RNG. (Just don't get attached to it because a few levels later, it'll be replaced.) The problem was more to do with the game does very little to teach you how your shields work and how to take advantage of them. There is a tutorial level but that's more about movement and the basics of combat. Shame really because shields are crucial to getting good and enjoying the game. There are clearly better classes than others out of the 8 available - engineer is meh at the beginning and plain shit the higher level you are, while soldier is great and smuggler is too. Within each class there are three main trees to skill from, usually best to pick all of one and grab passives from the others. Party re-skilling is cheap and well worth doing. My two major criticisms are: I wanted more variety overall from the locations and enemies; and the loot space on a mission is only 40 items FFS. I understand limiting stash space but to only allow 40 items on a mission, especially early on when you are scraping for gold, was wrong.

There's a lot of small and big problems with the game, so here's a list - Tablet/phone game UI makes it feel like it was ported straight from iOS - The story, setting and characters are all uninteresting and bland - Meme/political humor that contains just references and no good jokes on its own - Combat is extremely repetitive - you do the same thing over and over - Weapons feel more or less the same and you just compare a few numbers - Speaking of numbers, there are a lot of unexplained statistics in the inventory that I didn't really understood - Maps are repetitive, there's nothing interesting in them - Your primary resource when going into a mission are medkits. And you usually can't even buy them, so you usually lose the war of attrition that the game turns into - Battles are completely disconnected from the regular exploring - no kiting, no positioning, just shoot the enemy while they shoot you Pros: + Music! + It's a crawler, there's not a lot of them + It's fun the first few hours

Starcrawlers is a decent dungeon crawler, but the loot system is totally RNG dependent, which can hurt you if the RNG isn't on your side. The only way to get better gear in this game is to either find it or buy an in game loot box. There is no store to get better weapons or armor unless you have many cubes and even then what that gives you is still RNG dependent and changes all of the time. To give you an idea, at Level 13 I could buy an epic shield loot box, and get a shield that would have been awesome...at level 1. At level 13 it is just an insult though and way worse than what I have. But there's no way to buy better shields in the game, its just buy the loot box and pray it is something you need. If they would get rid of the RNG loot box system and put a real honest to goodness store in the game where you can buy shields, armor, and weapons directly I'd give it 3 - 3.5 stars. But as it is, that loot box system led to be aborting this game in the end as I got tired of it and having to do a random mission just to reset the loot boxes and hope it is now something I need.

Every time I want to play this game, I dread the inevitable full bag of loot. Why? Because the inventory is so small that I wind up trading out low-value items for high value items, which requires destroying the former and replacing it with the latter, There's no swapping mechanic. Its all very basic and tedious. I would think a game that runs on loot would have a more streamlined inventory system. Maybe inventory expansions come later in the game but I'll probably never make it.