This game is just amazing to me. I get the feeling it was designed by somebody who really understands how to make a roguelike challenging and highly replayable. Even after 100%ing the game, i find myself coming back and discovering new item combinations and playstyles.
I have had multiple "aaah i get it now" moments, each time increasing my understanding of the core gameplay mechanics.
This is one of those "one more round" games for me. It's highly addictive!
The trailer does a really good job of displaying that gameplay, but it does not cover a lot of the items and their combinations.
There are so many different playstyles depending on the items (relics?) you choose.
One of my favorites are the scout drones in combination with the command center. With the scout drones you can actually send a small amount of free units to another system. Command center allows you to select multiple systems to send drones from - meaning once you upgraded the relics to lvl 2 or 3 you really start to snowball. Which is always the most fun part of roguelikes to me.
The phalanx formation is also really fun, since it sends a large number of fast ships to the selected system. If upgraded, you can often jump from system to system and capture them in the process, allowing you to capture a lot of systems at the start of a round very quickly.
Enemies also utilize different sets of items and playstyles. Sometimes waiting for their time to strike, sometimes retalliating, sometimes stealing planets by just a hair. There were a lot of runs that died in regular levels, because one enemy used the "spread formation" every time i attack a system of theirs - only they send a spread formation from every system they own to the one you attacked from.
I especially enjoyed the boss levels since they propose a different kind of challenge to the regular levels, forcing you to really think about your approach in beating them.
There are some things i'd like to see improved though:
I would really appreciate some kind of endless mode, where the enemies just scale further and further, just to see how far i can really push things. The regular game often feels a little too short. Once you start snowballing the run is often almost over.
Also, having separate progressions for the different difficulties would be nice, as currently you keep all unlocks between all game modes. Currently it does not matter much, because there is no incentive (as far as i can tell) to actually play the different difficulties.
Also i have the feeling that some unlocks are a little broken once you have everything, because it has been quite a while since i saw the command center upgrade. Could just be random chance, although i played a lot of matches.
I could go on and on and on about this fantastic game. In the end i can only say that i crave more content for this game - More different levels, more items, longer runs, maybe some challenges.
100% recommended!
