StarVaders thrusts itself into the very crowded roguelike genre with some differences to try to set itself on a stage away from everything else. It does this by taking many of the staples of its core genres of deck building and tactics while running players through an increasingly hard gauntlet. On top of this, it adds a widely varied gameplay loop based on what character a player picks. It ends with a dash of time travel and time loop elements. The question is: Does the formula work? Cubed3 hops into the mech cockpit to find out.
It seems like a long time ago that people were bashing the ‘procedurally generated dungeons’ that were becoming all the rage for taking away finely crafted narrative or designed experiences of human-made levels. These, of course, were in reference to many early Metroidvania platformers that were the first that experimented with randomly created levels. The criticism was perhaps well founded as the levels were often soulless and repetitious, but it ignored a different question: Could a game instead be designed where it was still fun regardless of simplistic level design?
In a large way, this is what the modern “Rogue-XXXX” games have become. Relying on randomly created levels that anyone would be hard pressed to say were filled with heart leaves instead the bare bones of the experience remaining as the evidence of what it has to offer. Perhaps it is no surprise that stripping off level design still has resulted in some incredibly fun games. Not to justify level design as a waste, as this reviewer would argue quite the contrary, but rather that a game loop can be fun enough just in its stripped form to still carry the day.
All of this applies to games of this genre in general, but StarVaders does not stray far. It is a pretty easy game to explain: defend waves of enemies by playing cards to fight against them. The levels are as simple as the come, with small grids of coloured squares and some basically designed enemies. Players use cards to move their mech around the board and line up attacks before the enemies march to the bottom and do game-over damage. It’s simple, yet the StarVaders is oddly addictive and hits the right notes to stand out – despite its basic formula.
The game loop is simple enough, expanding from there. On each turn the player gets a small set of starting cards and has to balance only playing a few of them between movement and attacking a horde of advancing enemies. At the end of a battle the player is given a choice between one of three cards or upgrades. The cards depend on which character is being played, such as firing bullets or slashing a sword, while the upgrades are generally the same, like reducing the cost of a card or allowing extra movement. There is a rarity element to them, but as explained later, it rarely matters.
The fun comes in how wildly different runs can slowly start to become. The gunner is the basic mech that moves slow but can hit in a straight line across the board at any range. Builds can start to diverge, filling up the screen with tons of shots. One especially fun run saw a bunch of bomb cards that would blanket the board in bombs and blow everything away with suicidal imprecision. Even within the same class, characters can and will play differently, like the next gunner girl who gets to restore one card a turn and plays more agile, moving around the board and sniping enemies.
There are only a few problems that detract from the experience. While StarVaders runs mostly good on the Steam Deck, there was the occasional glitch of buttons not working or freezing during playtesting for review. A few times the game had to be reset, but luckily no major progress was lost.
At the highest difficulties, many of the characters and builds rapidly fall away due to how the game is structured, and it is unfortunate that so many are ultimately locked behind a wall of not being viable.
Perhaps the last complaint is that there is never any “whoa” or “OMG” type overpowered upgrades, cards or moves that occasionally gift players. In this genre, one of the key feelings is that rare but overpowered move that suddenly ties the whole run together. Here, players get stronger, but even the highest rarity upgrades are not that much better, which is a huge missed opportunity for some really fun imbalance.
For the first ten or so hours, players are going to get sucked into StarVaders and deeply enjoy its new take on deck building that mixes in a heavy slice of tactics. Past that, cracks will definitely appear at the higher levels between repetitious items and cards, many types of builds will be nonviable, and the general difficulty forces players into narrow channels. All that being said, in some ways, this is typical for the genre; a good 5-15-hour romp per game, then it’s time to move onto the next one.
