Hadley's Run: A Starship Saga

A wonderful roguelite space shooter that appealed both to my child-gamer-self - taking me right back to Asteroids on the Atari - and my smart-arse adult-gamer-self (I hate that guy), who loves great writing in his games. The art-style is original, vivid and colourful, and the spectacular explosions light up the cold, dark reaches of deep space like beautiful fireworks. The pulsing music is sublime and ear-wormy and perfectly compliments the frenetic schmuppy gameplay. The dialogue and characterisation are so good that, on a smaller scale, it reminds me of Hades’ dialogue system, wrapped as it is around the roguelite form in such a pleasing and exciting way: you actually look forward to getting back to the hub areas, which takes the edge off those inevitable deaths (this should be called the Hades effect!). There’s also an arcade mode, if you just want to shoot yourself up some spaceships, like we did back in the day. I wholeheartedly recommend this wondrous game.

Really fun little rouge like shooter. Great to kill 10min. Music is fantastic!

3/10 Boring, refunded.

Hadley’s Run is a pretty solid twin stick shooter. The controls are responsive and once you’ve learned their moves the enemies are not brutally unfair but they are not always a push over. Although the game runs on the easier side there were moments during the later parts of the game that gave me some trouble. The characters are cool and their unique dialogue each run makes you feel like you made some progress even if you lost a little early. There is a decent amount of variety to the parts that can be attached to your ship, I mixed and matched until I found the combo that I used the rest of the game. Environmental hazards shake up the gameplay and keep it decently fresh through the entire game. The inclusion of an endless mod was a nice touch. Took me about 5 hours to beat the campaign, did not play much after that unfortunately. Where the game is hurting the most is the enemy variety, especially bosses. There are about 10 different enemy types and you get the dame boss after each area every time. After killing the bosses over and over they begin to get a little stale. Rather then creating new bosses or enemies which I understand can be time consuming, slight tweaks could be made to the existing ones. A good example of this would be the Champion enemies from the “Binding of Issac” where it is the same enemy but they move a little faster, they have a vacuum that sucks you in, they have a ‘combat inhibitor’ and you can only hit them from a distance. Just little things like that could improve the replay value. Same with the bosses, instead of making more change their attack phases. Instead of Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3 it goes in a different order. Maybe the player can chose to face a more difficult boss that is a bit faster for a greater reward, there is already an option for normal areas so I believe it makes sense for the boss areas as well. Another thing that could improve replayability is incentivising the player to use other builds, because once I found a build I liked I never switched off of it. So perhaps their weapon has a “run cooldown” or the guy who upgrades your ship worked on the weapon you haven’t used in a while so if you start a run with that weapon you get an upgrade right off the bat. Even though I just wrote a big paragraph with a bunch of critiques I still had a lot of fun running through Hadley’s Run, and I would recommend it to any fan of twin stick shooters.

Shooty fun with a good story. Also works well on Linux.

I totally loved the demo, so when I saw there was a significant discount, I snatched it right up! It’s a bit on the difficult side , but thats ok, because you don’t want these games to be over too soon. I think the only thing I would complain about, and I hate to even mention it, is that there is entirely too much dialogue going on. This isn’t so much a fault of the game, as it is a fault within myself… I’m lazy, and sometimes don’t want to get wrapped up in a story (I usually don’t like the storytelling within most games though, so don’t let that sway your decision). Besides, the story here is actually quite good, and hilarious to boot! But sometimes I just wanna get in there and start the battle. It’d be nice if there were an option to have only the important text pop up, or a “skip all except mission specific text”, but that’s just me nitpicking. This game is brilliant, and the future will look back at it as a hidden gem unless more of you pick it up! I mean, at least give the demo a shot, you have nothing to lose!

Music, backgrounds, character art: great. Enemy sprites: not so great to drab and repetitive. Gameplay: repetitive and slow. Upgrades: 10% increases on things too often. Don't always feel like a great reward. Breaking established conventions of these games: When bosses die, moving on to their exploding corpse kills you.

Какая-то постметаироничная идиотия. Понимаете ли, когда вы убиваете "космического босса-курицу", это не смешно и не прикольно, это убого и скучно. Ну и по остальному: музыку сразу же стоит выключить, потому что задолбает через 10 минут. Враги однообразные. Апгрейды не чувствуются совсем, всё ватное.

Great little game. The comparisons to Hades are true enough in that its got a story that persists over runs, that said it only takes two completions to get the final credits with a few more little quests that remain after that. The music is great. I can't help but feel like there is a little bit missing though, legendary level upgrades don't change the gameplay that significantly, I'd like to see some more wild synergies between upgrades and combinations of chosen equipment. Overall I do recommend, the value for money is good as is!

A challenging yet fun little shoot em up/roguelite with a great soundtrack and a distinctly South African flavour to its dialogue and aesthetic. Gets a little repetitive since you have to repeat sections if you die but at least there's some fresh dialogue in between. Overall I recommend giving this a go if you have any love for shootemups, roguelites or lekker music!