I got to spend a couple of hours with developer Pengonauts and publishers Joystick Ventures & Playworks’ coming deckbuilding, turn-based tactics game ‘StarVaders’. And I should be upfront with this—I’m what you call a little… Worn out on the deckbuilding mechanic. Not that I hate it! But I’ve played so many games with it as a basis to their roguelikes that I’m just kind of over it, they’re all sort of starting to blur into one another.
Now imagine my surprise when I find myself being pulled into an evening and some with StarVaders, completely without permission and at odds with the work I had to have been doing. This is a tactics game that is simple to pick up and will challenge you with each move you have to make. Players will take on the role of multiple pilots as they get into their mechs to fight off a dangerous alien invasion. Battles take place on a vertical grid, the bottom three rows being home base. Aliens of all sorts will spawn from the top and will make their way down, row after row turn after turn, and it’s your job to make sure they don’t get to see the light of day.
So, how do you go about repelling the alien scum? Well, through cards, of course! Your deck will consist of tactical and attack cards that, at bare minimum, help you adjust the playing field while dishing out damage. These cards can be upgraded by following available paths in the stage selection screen, which slowly advances players through three acts per run. At the end of each act, you’ll be pit against a boss who will test the cards and upgrades you have amassed. Losing a run levels up your chose class, which provides you with stronger cards that you can take with you again in future runs.
I think what really clicked for me was just how easy it is to pick up and play this game. Card details and their plays are succinctly described without paragraphs of nonsense. Different characters provide different kinds of play, like Noel and her ability to “freeze” cards to make them infinitely useable and to cure of them of the “burnt” status that can afflict cards in your deck. See, you don’t have a health system to worry about per se—when enemies attack, or you are injured via self-infliction (this has benefits!), your deck begins to fill with junk. Junk cards can also give enemies buffs! Plus, burnt cards can also accumulate when you spend a card that goes over your available turn limit (in the form of a “heat gauge”).
There’s a lot of ways for a player to become completely over encumbered, but there’s also a lot of ways to take these negative stats and turn them around! Cards you collect can take junk and amplify their own stats if you’ve upgraded them to do so and burnt cards can also be used in their own ways as well. Best of all, it’s just really easy to understand this stuff and be caught by surprise with other ways you can enhance your current play style. Like for example, at one point I upgraded one of my tri-shot cards with the ability to push back enemies rather than damage them. I did this by accident and found it to be a boon as I could now bump enemies into one another to clear them out in greater numbers.
Little accidents like this come in handy, because StarVaders will throw out large numbers of enemies at you as well as introducing new enemies into each new run—meaning that a new run won’t necessarily be any easier than the last few. Mistakes can be easily made in a turn against hordes like this, or worse: you end up with a bad hand! But you get three chances per battle to completely redo a turn, complete with providing you a new hand to work with. It won’t really stop hordes of aliens from hanging out at your door, but it can make the difference between a saved and failed run.
All this comes wrapped up with a pleasant art style, energetic music, and short story beats that gives you insight into the world of StarVaders and your chosen playable character. I put roughly seven hours into the game before I had to get back to my other reviews, but I walked away from Pengonauts’ coming deckbuilder pleasantly surprised. Here’s a roguelike that could challenge a player but not waste swaths of their time in a single choice much less a full run, all the while being easy to understand and fun to exploit.
Fans of the genre should keep an eye out for StarVaders when it launches on PC via Steam on the 30th of April—I don’t think you’ll want to miss out on this one. ∎
