STARCRAWLERS

God knows how much I love dungeron crawlers, and finding a DRPG that ISN'T a high fantasy game is awesomesauce.
Starcrawlers is a sci-fi game about doing chores for big pharma n' shit. The whole game is procedurally generated dungeons. I find the dungeon variety good enough to play multiple times. If you're not used to the grind, then it might be a slog for you. This whole genre's based off of dungeon grinding, so what are you doing here.

The combat system is standard as well. The move animations look fun, but I find having MULTIPLE DIFFERENT MANA SYSTEMS a weird ass decision. I get there's lore about it, but why not just call it the same thing? I don't know why that irks me so bad, it just makes combat feel more complicated than it actually is. Combat can last WAY to fucking long, though. Enemies spawn more enemies and sponge up hits like a tank. At one point I was literally resetting if I hit a certain enemy it got so bad.
Also some character choices are just frustrating from a gameplay standpoint. I am mostly talking about malfunctions in the engineer and the Robot. FUCK MALFUNCTIONS. Why am I being punished for playing the game?


The cyberpunky aesthetic is enough to set it apart from everyone else. The story is alright. I've only played 1 of the routes, the corpo lapdog route, but I am going back to play the others. Usually I don't play a game twice so close together. The writing is a bit quirkycore; Some jokes fall flat as hell, but it did get a sensible chuckle out of me. There's a drunk robot. The art is wonderful. I may just be tired of anime aesthetic. Thats a total plague on dungeon games.

Overall, I give this game a 5/10. Good time waster, middling dungeon game. I played it for the aesthetics, mostly.