StarCrawlers Chimera

As a fan of the original Starcrawlers I was eager to get my hands on Chimera and try out the revamped combat system and solo character mechanic. Happy to say I am not disappointed. I'll try to be thorough and go over some key points I have noticed. First of all, the bad: As of EA release, the game is on the short end. There are three floors of the Chimera building to explore, but after that you will either have to wait or start a new game (see 'the good' section). I have noticed several steamers claiming to have found bugs or a buggy experience, so take into consideration that you may have to deal with unpatched issues should you purchase (to the game's credit, I have completed virtually all of the first floor without encountering a noticeable bug. Not to say they don't exist). The good: Probably the strongest selling point of Chimera is it's character customization. You are allowed to freely choose up to seven skill trees out of a current total of I believe 36 in order to create a custom character class. Even with only 3 levels, there is a great potential in restarting the game just to try out a different set of skills or fine tune the class you have already run with. The downside to this (I probably should have but this in 'the bad') is that not all of the skill trees are currently fleshed out. Given that the game currently only runs a few levels, this probably won't be too much of an issue though, but it is something to note. Combat is fluid, and a good variety of movement, passive, stealth, and ranged skills are available. I never felt like I was at a lack of options when it came to different ways to engage enemies (the game is very combat focused). A lot of side missions (which you can do for rewards in the form of loot) are fairly simple 'kill these monsters' or 'find this item' type of missions, so if you are looking for something more in depth or story-driven, this may not be the game to find these things in. All in all I am very happy with Chimera.

StarCrawlers Chimera seems an exercise in procedural masochism compared to the first lofty title I am not reviewing here; THAT one was a good game: Chimera is a... well, 'chimera' actually IS a proper title for it, an unmanageable and difficult play of a game. Maybe the developer was having problems with a follow-up, to be fair, so named it this for this reason? I believe someone mentioned duplicates and the malfunctioning generation of the nanite clouds and such things as a problem, that is what I also mean mainly: If this can be fixed, it has real potential to be as good as the first, if not an improvement on it. I hope they do fix this, but there are no updates yet this year. Three stars for hope of it's repair; it would be five stars if it did not lose it's mind entirely after a first even uncompleted playthrough: Seems some basic programming could be tweaked to fix this; I think one major part of the team was unavailable for awhile before fixing some things last year. I wish them well getting this done, also for GOG gamers to also play -- if they can again update this soon it would be FUN.

The first game was an excellent dungeon crawler, so I was excited when I first saw that it was finally getting a sequel. Now Imagine my disappointment when what we get is something that throws everything that made the original great into a bin to try to make it more "roguelite". Instead of having a party of 4 engaging in turn based battles, you instead are a single character. And my first thought was "Oh this may be like Vaporum," And that would have been fine if that was the case, but its not. Combat is sloppy as all hell. You have absolutely no way of dodging attacks apart from rng, which makes combat against groups of enemies really unfair. Especially since your character loves to miss, even at the weapons optimal range. And skills don't seem to fair much better. Balancing is also a mess. The first floor went fine and I didn't think the worse, but then I got to the second and thought I had somehow ended up on a floor I wasn't supposed to be yet. Enemies jump in power and there are mini bosses all over the damn place that zap your health with just a few attacks. After getting killed to a giant spider that decided to block the corridor over and over, I ended up giving up. Maybe the game gets better later, but I just do not care at this point. Everything I liked about the first game is gone. There's barely any story or lore as well, so I really don't feel like I'm missing out. Oh, and even though this is finally out of EA, there are still numerous bugs. Unfortunately, this game may have killed any chance at getting a proper starcrawlers 2, so just stick to the first game, or pick up vaporum if you want a better game that what this is trying to be.