StarCrawlers, a gritty spacepunk dungeon crawler has released and it's looking good

StarCrawlers [Steam, Official Site] is a game I covered quite some time ago back in March of 2015, years later it's now released in full. It's a fresh take on the 3D dungeon crawlers set in a spacepunk themed universe.


Features

• Wage strategic battles against futuristic enemies with an innovative time unit turn-based combat system.
• Procedurally-generated dungeons and events create endless replayability.
• Choose your allies and your foes wisely. Your choices will change how the story unfolds.
• Eight player classes each with unique abilities, both in combat and when exploring.
• Randomly generated weapons, armor and gear with upgradeable enhancements.
• Easy to Hardcore difficulty modes and optional permadeath.

As always, I try my best to test everything I write about if there is a build available. I have fond memories of trying early builds of this game as it was so polished even early on. Having a sci-fi spacepunk themed universe with this type of game is pretty exciting. It's not the usual kind of setting you see for these types of games, usually featuring bows, arrows and magic so it already stands out in the crowd thanks to that.

I'm impressed with it, especially when creating a character you're able to choose your gender in all the classes, each with their own avatar. I know for some people it's an issue, for various reasons, so I'm happy to say it's not a problem here. Each class has their own set of unique abilities, backstory and so on. There's a far bit of customization available so it should suit plenty of different play-styles.

It's an impressive fully 3D dungeon crawler with mouse look and WASD/QE movement and I have to say, graphically it's quite impressive. Some textures are a bit blurry, but mostly it looks decent enough. It has RPG elements in the form of classes, loot, levelling up with various skills to choose and turn-based combat. The combat is interesting too, your place in turn queue depends on what attack/ability you use, as each have a different cost in time. It ends up quite exciting and challenging to try out different combinations and equipment.

There's a lot of possible loot to find, so thankfully the developers show what statistics change when you hover over various items. It's a small thing, but incredible useful and it's surprising when developers forget to do this. Really nice to see it in, gives it a properly polished feeling and gives leaves headaches when comparing items.

What's interesting, is that it's not just an endless crawler, there's actually a story unfolding as you progress. I don't want to spoil anything, but it's pretty great. The way the story unfolds is interesting too, since your choices seem like they actually matter. The game features various corporations, each with their own agenda and some missions see you performing tasks that increase your reputation with one, but reduce it with another.

I only encountered two issues, which was due to having two monitors. Thankfully, it's not as bad as a lot of games. It simply gave me a slightly off resolution, but changing it was simple and it didn't try to stretch across, so it's actually pretty good compared to a lot of games when it comes to more monitors.

The second is that when you interact with objects, the mouse cursor then ends up staying on the screen. Opening the game menu and closing it fixes it. A common issue that lots of games suffer from, sadly.

After tackling space mites, robots and more, my quest quickly came to an end at the hands of a medical robot. The damn thing had some sort of poison I wasn't quite expecting and I quickly met my maker. Looking forward to another run, but luckily permadeath is optional, so I can carry on from a previous save.

An exciting dungeon crawler in a great setting, filled to the brim with content and thanks to the procedural generation each game will be different. Well worth taking a look, happy exploring crawlers! Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.