Weekly /r/Games Discussion - What have you been playing, and what are your thoughts? - September 11, 2022

I've been playing Starcrawlers, tl;dr: a spacepunk, party- and turn-based grid dungeon crawler with excellent atmosphere and deep mechanics that is somewhat held back by low diversity in enemies and environments in its procedurally generated missions

Pros: * Strategic depth - The turn order is determined by the time value of actions, which varies based on a character's equipped weapon and the multipliers of their individual abilities. Both your party and enemies have shield charges to mitigate damage; these are much more easily depleted by single target abilities but may not be penetrated by multi-target abilities. There are a variety of abilities that can manipulate turn order, deplete shields, inflict useful status buffs or debuffs, etc

  • Build diversity - Individual classes' skilltrees may have more obvious build-arounds but party synergies seem much more subtle and diverse, with every class being able to serve different roles in a party in combat. The diversity of modifiers on equipment also lends itself to this

  • Atmosphere - The graphics are not anything to write home about, but the ambiance is great and generally hits what I would want out of a "cyberpunk-in-space" dungeon crawler

  • Faction system - There's a large number of factions in the game, who offer different benefits if you get on their good side - and consequences if you get on their bad side. Most missions offer reputation for one at the cost of another, which forces you to considers the pros and cons of taking missions for corps

Neutral *

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