Blasting away rocks and pirates in Stardrift Nomads, some thoughts

I've been playing Stardrift Nomads [Steam, Official Site], a twin-stick space shooter with Tower Defence elements and it holds up pretty well.


Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.

This is one of those games that arrived on Linux after users requested it on Steam, the developer rather quickly asked for testers and only a day later it was released. Pretty amazing turn-around so I was eager to give it a shot.

To my surprise, it actually works quite well with the Steam Controller if you set the right pad into Joystick Camera mode. The default didn't work well, as it wouldn't continue to fire. It also oddly had DPAD UP as DPAD Down, so the bindings were a little off. You will need to adjust them yourself using the Steam Controller configuration as you cannot change gamepad controls in-game.

I do love it when games mash genres together to form something beautiful and it's a reasonable attempt. You control a single spaceship tasked with protecting a space station with a talking dog giving you orders, but you're not alone. You can also collect scrap from fallen pirates and asteroids, which is exchanged for money at your space station.

If the campaign mode isn't your thing, there's also a survival mode to really test your abilities. You can choose an amount of waves, or play endlessly until you die.

You have different ship classes to choose from, each having their own set of towers and abilities. This makes it quite a varied game with the ability to customize it to your liking. You can change ship colours, level up abilities and more.

What makes the game surprising is that it has cross-platform multiplayer (no local multiplayer), with up to eight people. Samsai tried the online mode in a recent livestream, which did not end well as it was surprisingly buggy. One example: he was firing his weapon, but the colony was firing it instead of his ship, things just didn't sync up correctly. The player who joined him ended up with a black map and the issues continue. Hopefully the developers can look into this as I have let them know.

While I initially enjoyed it, everything ends up feeling annoyingly slow. It also has a real problem with giving you tutorial text whilst enemy waves are coming in often making it impossible to actually read them and take the information in.

It doesn't just feel slow, it also feels a bit shallow. There's little variation in the music and sound effects creating a somewhat dull experience when you've played more than half an hour. It's also really annoying to force you through watching numbers add up on the death screen, before letting you return to the menu.

In the end what we have is an okay twin-stick shooter with some interesting Tower Defence elements and upgrade possibilities, but it's just not exciting. Good for a little while, but it becomes boring quite quickly.

I don't hate it and if you're a twin-stick junky it might be what you're after, I just wish it was more exciting. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.