Not really a starcrawlers experience like the last was, no party play and stuff. Yeah, get over it, pups. It's more like a 3D nethack with guns. With diablo like loot (much in the style of it's predecessor, but way better). Game play ranges from running around akimbo style bullet-dodging as a space pirate to engineer necromant shooting fireballs and summoning the machine ghost to help down it's enemies. It's crazy. It's a bit clunky at times, too. But man, for that price this game is just a massive steal. If you ever played nethack or dungeon master, this is the game for you. I'm having a blast with it!
If you finished the latest Grimrock and can't bother to play it again, star crawlers gives you a "quick" crawler fix. Sadly, the combat/character/progression design collapses into a grind fest after level 5 or so. To be frank: the game consists of a dozen or so okayish story dungeons. Each of these story dungeons has a bunch of dialog and usually a nice boss fight or puzzle at the end. In between you "need" to level up your goons in random dungeons because the game doesn't give enough XP or loot to upgrade in a way that's necessary to beat the bosses. The enemy scaling is quite annoying. They start out already as bullet sponges, and at the time you hit level 30 they have like 15 to 30 times more hp than you. Combat is tedious and unrewarding. Only the bosses drop good items if any. Item/affix design is poor. Drop rates are mediocre, especially for orange (legendary) item that are crazily better than any purple (rare item quality) item you can find. Given that items only last 3-4 levels, the whole loot/gear up spiral doesn't work. You could start grinding at level 100 for good gear, but getting there is a borefest. Affixes cannot be crafted or exchanged like in other games (That would be a godsend). You can only put a "+1-6% accuracy / 1-3% crit chance" enhancement on all weapons you find. That's the extend of crafting in this game. It's non-existent. Sad. Instead the dev added a NG+ as if the game is not grindy enough in the normal mode. NG+/NG++ is hilariously bad. You can grind past Level 30 up to Level 100. In return there is.. nothing. Items just progress linear in damage, that's it. No new affixes, classes, skilltrees, prefixes or item sets. You are still limited to old skills. They scale minimaly with weapon damage.. so there is really nothing to see in NG/NG++, albeit it's called "New". You can only take a few different dialog choices that lead to mildly different endings. But the game's content is already stretched ten times in normal mode.
4+ years in EA - no relevant patches or bugfixes since. Don't touch it! It is dead.
For the price you get a lot of playtime. Comparable products like Hearthstone charge you easily the same price and give you like 1h of gameplay and a few cards. This one offers a lot more entertainment, good written dialogues and nice puzzles. Must buy if you like card games and enjoyed gwent.
Story and Characterwriting: Great, done by Chris Avellone (*****) Sounds and Background music: Great, done by Inon Zur, who also did Dragon Age Origins music among many others (****) Combat encounter design after Tutorial zone: Bad, very bad. Unbalanced to the point of no-fun. ( * ) Other game mechanics: Lacking. Resting system is annoying as you would have like a dozen of them when you just want to get from A to B. Just annoying. Put the horrible balanced random encounters on top that you almost always get when camping in the wilderness. No fun. Maps and World design: A lot of very small zones. Doesn't really feel like you are exploring a world although the overworld map is quite large. Bugs: There a quite some glitches, long loading times and minor annoyances. Some game breaking bugs have been reported. Could be a decent game after 1 -2 major patches. Combat encounters have to be completely revamped. Avoid for now until you are a die-hard D&D fan (like me). For the moment Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity 2 are the far superior games, especially in terms of character developement and combat design. Far. Far superior. And I wouldn't consider those games to be totally combat centered of even have brilliant combat design, but at least it is fun and entertaining. Can't say the same of Pathfinder - sadly.
