StarCrawlers
sponsored by ShadySands Great Game Giveaway
Overview:
StarCrawlers is a SciFi RPG in which the player is the captain of a crew of "crawlers", of guns for hire, mercenaries, people who get the job done, whatever you may want to call them. If you were to draw parallels you could think of the crew of the Firefly or a a crew of shadowrunners. Using a space station out in the fringes of known space as a base of operation, you take on missions for the various megacorps. And somewhere there is an overarching plot, but you can safely ignore it and take lucrative, random jobs.
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Gameplay:
StarCrawlers takes the old rpg formula we remember from oldies such as Eye of the Beholder or the newer returns to that style like Legend of Grimrock and adapts them to a SciFi setting and proper turn-based combat.
What this means is: you walk around in first person, square by square, using WASD and QE to strafe, while the mouse allows you to look around and interact with your surroundings. When you encounter an enemy, and they enter combat range (or ambush you as part of an event), the screen changes to a battle screen, still first person, but quite similar to many RPGs of this type.
At the top of the screen you see the initiative order. In the example screenshot above, it is Shady's turn and he is about to hit a security droid with a Combo Strike. Each ability has different costs in Time Units, and various buffs and debuffs can, as one comes to expect, affect the initiative order (Labadal for example can learn to Overclock an ally and bring them forward by a hundred time units).
The good thing here is that there are interactions and combos between abilities, so there is opportunity for fun tactical play.
Outside of combat you explore the corridors and rooms of spaceships or corporate offices. They are usually fairly dark, but that is alright as you can simply turn on your suit's flashlight. What makes the exploration interesting are the many spots the party can interact with - the panels and terminals Hackers can try to hack, or the tight spaces only a Cyberninja can squeeze through.
or
Of course results are not always guaranteed to be positive
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You, the player:
At the beginning of the game, you will create your character by picking one of the seven classes: Cyberninja, Engineer, Force Psyker, Hacker, Smuggler, Soldier, Void Psyker.
Then comes the fun part: creating the background! Each character has three stages in their backstory: Childhood, Adulthood, Now. For each class there are three options to choose from for each stage.
While the flavour of Childhood events differ from class to class, they all boil down to the choice between: Street Code, Formal Education, Street Culture. these can affect conversations in the game.
Adulthood and Now choices can directly affect your character's stats, their starting equipment, and or their standing with various factions.
Once in-game, you will be able to spend the first ability points of your character. Similar to Diablo and its derivatives, be it Borderlands or whatever, each class has three skill trees:
The inventory is rather basic, with 4 slots: weapon, armour, shield, accessory.
Though your background choices can result in some interesting starting items...
With the character created, the game begins with you arriving at STIX, your home for the duration of the game.
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STIX:
STIX is the game's hub. Here you can buy and sell stuff, gamble for random loot, retrain your abilities, put stuff in your stash, hire new members for your party, and get missions. In this STIX is just like any other hub, be it a tavern or Tristram. But the hub has some nice detail that fit the setting. You can auction off sensitive loot through the black market dealer, and they may not have anyone directly interested and simply provide you with credits, but they may also get proper offers from factions.
TEC was not pleased with all the things that ended up in other corps' hands after that raid.
And if you don't want to leave your interactions with the megacorps to chance missions on the bounty board, why not call up their HQ and ask for a liaison?
OK, most likely they will put you on hold indefinitely. But once they know who you are, maybe there will come a time when they will pick up.
But if that is an alternative to the bounty board... what bounty board?
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The Missions:
Most of your game time will be spend in missions, exploring, infiltrating, assaulting... all the good things and not so good things crews like yours get involved in.
You pick a mission you like, based on rewards, the reputation you wish to earn or lose, and the mission difficulty. Then you head in, do all the stuff we mentioned above, and hopefully walk back to your ship having successfully completed your objective. Sometimes, at least in the story missions, you may find side objectives. How you will handle those is up to you, but not everyone will necessarily like you afterwards.
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The Writing:
Rather tongue in cheek, and mostly reserved for the various interactions during missions and some banter during the story - do not except long exposition. But it is worth at least a chuckle, and being short and non-intrusive will hopefully prevent it from becoming tedious in repetition.
Even if you end up arguing with Labadal about the possible value on the black market of a Tec-employee's porn stash.