Star Crawlers -- square-based scifi dungeon crawler with a plot
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 4:16 pm
Star Crawlers is a square-based scifi dungeon crawler where you moved in square grids and while you can mouse free-look (and even that is optional thing you can turn off) movement is turn-based. The maps are obviously procedurally generated, and pretty well done with some verticality to it so you don't completely feel 2D restricted, even though you are, as you can sort of "see" 3D stuff around you.
You are a "crawler", basically a ronin mercenary stuck out in the middle of nowhere, space terminal IX, aka "STIX". There's Doc's Bar, the clinic (heal and revive), the supply shop (accessories), the hack shop (for hacking decks), and the black market. If you are playing in holiday mode, you can find holiday specific tokens while on missions to trade for holiday-themed items via the "extra" merchant.
Doc's Bar is also where the plot advances as you do special dialogs, as well as jumping on the job board and find some OTHER missions to perform, for the usual loot. The trick here is most missions have a perp and a victim, usually both corporations, but sometimes, a corp may hire you to raid its own facilities in order to recover something left behind when they had to evacuate for a variety of reasons. Each job have a recommended character/party level, and if you are 2 levels above the recommended level the mission is considered cakewalk, while if you are 2 levels BELOW, the emission's considered dangerous. A bit like Borderlands, actually. As you play, your reputation with each party will change, and even as you play, you may "steal" info or item that would affect your standing with those two corps or orgs, beyond that the mission itself does, esp. if you then try to auction them off in the black market. And if you sell off too many items and/or anger too many people, you may encounter some of their forces trying to hunt you down...
You have eight classes to choose from for your characters. You can only create ONE, but you can hire up to 7 more. But you can only take 4 into battle at a time. The classes are: cyberninja, prototype (AI robot), engineer, force psyker, smuggler, void psyker, soldier, and hacker.
They don't have exact equivalents in regular RPG. They are quite different, and you should experiment with all classes. They all work pretty well together, with no class being non-essential, no class is overpowering. Game is well-balanced so far. I mostly just went with my initial party of cyberninja, prototype, engineer, and force psyker as that was the initial order I got them in, and they are the ones that levelled up. But I've tried other party compositions, such as swapping out engineer for soldier, or leave cyberninja and prototype home and let engineer and soldier take void psyker and smuggler out on a run. They had no problem on mission rated for L26, despite being 25, 27, 21, and 21 respectively.
Combat is turn-based with a command wheel: you can see the "queue" of actions that will be taken i.e. whose turn is it next. When it is your character's turn, you click on enemy to show the wheel menu. Those are the actions you can perform chosen from your abilities palette. If you have unlocked more powerful abilities, please adjust your abilities accordingly (unless they are passive). Each of your actions take specific amount of "time units", and some weapons/armor/actions can change the TU resulting in adjusting the order of play depending on your die roll.
You and enemies are equipped with armor and shield. Enemy fire must break through shield to damage you. And both sides can get buff and debuff to enhanced your damage to them while minimize their damage to you, and the other side is doing the same thing for their side. There are also many different types of elemental weapons doing different types of damage, fire, chemical, void, and so on. Again, very Borderlands type of vibe.
You may also come across certain horizontal terminals that you can jack in with your "cyberdeck" and do cybercombat, as you remove hostile software agents from node after node. You start with a physical jack-in point, but you can slowly proceed to take over the whole network. And you can raid network storage for both data you can sell for money, as well as programs for your cyberdeck.
Cyberdeck has 3 types of attack programs, and 4 types of defensive programs. 3 types of attack are security, corruption, and deception. Under each type there are multiple apps with names like "Jolt" or ", ranging from basic V1.0 to legendary V5.0. You can own dozens of these, but only five at a time are active on the command wheel. You also need defensive apps which, when some math is done, gives your deck hardening (HP), attack, defend, critical %, and so on.
And with these you can do some interesting combos. Like put up barrier to block enemy attack for 3 turns, then next turn use Dupe to make a clone of yourself (albeit with less HP) that can attack independent of you.
Enemies can be roughly grouped the same way: blue enemies do security damage, green enemies do deception damage, and red enemies corruption damage. Buffs and debuffs can make you more or less susceptible to certain damages, depending on enemy type and buffs applied.
Unfortunately, cybercombat does not earn XP or gain you additional apps automatically. You have to be sure to conquer storage nodes and then you need other attack apps to ensure you have a high chance of success when using them to hack terminals and security nodes to search for valuable data such as attack programs. So it's more of a side-game. And having a hacker on the team means she can usually hack locks and terminals successfully thus needing less cyberdeck action. On the other hand, it was nice for them to tie in certain cyber nodes to certain security setup in certain rooms, so if you defeat security in the cyberworld, the security sensors and bots in that room is stopped as well, and lock doors can be also opened this way instead of brute-forcing the door (with engineer) or hacking the door (hacker).
Hacking also gives intelligence on where the enemies may be and where your objective is. And that can be very helpful for you to either avoid enemies... or go for them for extra XP.
You are a "crawler", basically a ronin mercenary stuck out in the middle of nowhere, space terminal IX, aka "STIX". There's Doc's Bar, the clinic (heal and revive), the supply shop (accessories), the hack shop (for hacking decks), and the black market. If you are playing in holiday mode, you can find holiday specific tokens while on missions to trade for holiday-themed items via the "extra" merchant.
Doc's Bar is also where the plot advances as you do special dialogs, as well as jumping on the job board and find some OTHER missions to perform, for the usual loot. The trick here is most missions have a perp and a victim, usually both corporations, but sometimes, a corp may hire you to raid its own facilities in order to recover something left behind when they had to evacuate for a variety of reasons. Each job have a recommended character/party level, and if you are 2 levels above the recommended level the mission is considered cakewalk, while if you are 2 levels BELOW, the emission's considered dangerous. A bit like Borderlands, actually. As you play, your reputation with each party will change, and even as you play, you may "steal" info or item that would affect your standing with those two corps or orgs, beyond that the mission itself does, esp. if you then try to auction them off in the black market. And if you sell off too many items and/or anger too many people, you may encounter some of their forces trying to hunt you down...
You have eight classes to choose from for your characters. You can only create ONE, but you can hire up to 7 more. But you can only take 4 into battle at a time. The classes are: cyberninja, prototype (AI robot), engineer, force psyker, smuggler, void psyker, soldier, and hacker.
They don't have exact equivalents in regular RPG. They are quite different, and you should experiment with all classes. They all work pretty well together, with no class being non-essential, no class is overpowering. Game is well-balanced so far. I mostly just went with my initial party of cyberninja, prototype, engineer, and force psyker as that was the initial order I got them in, and they are the ones that levelled up. But I've tried other party compositions, such as swapping out engineer for soldier, or leave cyberninja and prototype home and let engineer and soldier take void psyker and smuggler out on a run. They had no problem on mission rated for L26, despite being 25, 27, 21, and 21 respectively.
Combat is turn-based with a command wheel: you can see the "queue" of actions that will be taken i.e. whose turn is it next. When it is your character's turn, you click on enemy to show the wheel menu. Those are the actions you can perform chosen from your abilities palette. If you have unlocked more powerful abilities, please adjust your abilities accordingly (unless they are passive). Each of your actions take specific amount of "time units", and some weapons/armor/actions can change the TU resulting in adjusting the order of play depending on your die roll.
You and enemies are equipped with armor and shield. Enemy fire must break through shield to damage you. And both sides can get buff and debuff to enhanced your damage to them while minimize their damage to you, and the other side is doing the same thing for their side. There are also many different types of elemental weapons doing different types of damage, fire, chemical, void, and so on. Again, very Borderlands type of vibe.
You may also come across certain horizontal terminals that you can jack in with your "cyberdeck" and do cybercombat, as you remove hostile software agents from node after node. You start with a physical jack-in point, but you can slowly proceed to take over the whole network. And you can raid network storage for both data you can sell for money, as well as programs for your cyberdeck.
Cyberdeck has 3 types of attack programs, and 4 types of defensive programs. 3 types of attack are security, corruption, and deception. Under each type there are multiple apps with names like "Jolt" or ", ranging from basic V1.0 to legendary V5.0. You can own dozens of these, but only five at a time are active on the command wheel. You also need defensive apps which, when some math is done, gives your deck hardening (HP), attack, defend, critical %, and so on.
And with these you can do some interesting combos. Like put up barrier to block enemy attack for 3 turns, then next turn use Dupe to make a clone of yourself (albeit with less HP) that can attack independent of you.
Enemies can be roughly grouped the same way: blue enemies do security damage, green enemies do deception damage, and red enemies corruption damage. Buffs and debuffs can make you more or less susceptible to certain damages, depending on enemy type and buffs applied.
Unfortunately, cybercombat does not earn XP or gain you additional apps automatically. You have to be sure to conquer storage nodes and then you need other attack apps to ensure you have a high chance of success when using them to hack terminals and security nodes to search for valuable data such as attack programs. So it's more of a side-game. And having a hacker on the team means she can usually hack locks and terminals successfully thus needing less cyberdeck action. On the other hand, it was nice for them to tie in certain cyber nodes to certain security setup in certain rooms, so if you defeat security in the cyberworld, the security sensors and bots in that room is stopped as well, and lock doors can be also opened this way instead of brute-forcing the door (with engineer) or hacking the door (hacker).
Hacking also gives intelligence on where the enemies may be and where your objective is. And that can be very helpful for you to either avoid enemies... or go for them for extra XP.