Star Renegades

Flawed masterpiece. [i]Very[/i] flawed. Star Renegades's core gameplay is extremely solid. In particular, its turn-based timing system is quite innovative. You chain your attacks on a timeline, with the opportunity to kick the enemies attack out of the turn, and to reliably trigger critical strikes when targeting an enemy who will attack after you. This is a deep, engaging system with plenty of synergistic mechanics to back it up, and despite having played a lot of turn-based roguelites, I've not seen anything quite like it until Star Renegades. That being said, this system is still plagued with occasional but devastating bugs. Chief among them is the unreliability of the shown timeline of attacks. Most of the time, it is perfectly accurate. But when an enemy isn't delayed from attacking (or killed), despite the game promising it will be, your run can end right there. All you need to lose a fight is one devastating attack you didn't mitigate because it wasn't supposed to happen. Mechanics aside, there is another really serious problem which is the overall tone of the game, and its abysmal writing. Star Renegades welcomes you with a nice animated intro. Then the game itself shows itself, with gorgeous art that, much like the gameplay, is remarkably unique. And, completely at odds with everything else, the story (if you can even call it that) tries its utmost to be as derivative as humanly possible, and constantly makes fun of itself, yet without actually managing to be funny. Every single character is written as a boring caricature of some sci-fi archetype, no matter how convoluted. (like, there is a cackling star-destroying villain that has no business being in your team, but he is, with zero explanation) It's like someone in the dev team decided to utterly desecrate the work of everyone else by turning the game into a very shallow parody of itself. If I had to guess, it's probably the same person who decided to then shoehorn Darkest Dungeon's camping system and Shadow of Mordor's nemesis system into the game. Neither has any business being here and nor brings anything of value. But because they are there, you will have to spend tedious time navigating menus and hands of cards to get critical information or measly bonuses instead of actually playing the game. If you can tolerate all of this, you will find Star Renegades to still be a worthwhile experience in itself, with a great variety of available strategies. Special mention to the difficulty scale, which actually challenges you and makes you refine your gameplay and ponder every decision until you achieve real, tangible mastery of it all.

Despite my interest in it, I put off getting this game for a long time because I had always heard that it's punishingly difficult, unfair, and full of bugs. Finally got it and WOW, it's so good and easily exceeded all of my expectations! Yes it's tough, but I like a tough roguelite. It does take some time to learn the game and the tutorial is not great, but there are excellent guides out there and once you understand how everything works (especially time manipulation) the game really starts to flow and becomes a lot of fun. If you have any interest at all I'd recommend giving it a try!

Pretty decent roguelike overall. The characters are interesting and varied, the story is really cool, the world building is rad. The battle system is tight and well done. And the progeny system is a cool way to unlock new characters. Definitely recommend if it goes on sale, I've been having a good time. The game feels good overall but it's clear it didn't quite have enough time to cook. It's full of bugs, balancing issues, difficulty is too brutal considering the levels of rng, certain areas and bosses are pointless and it's painfully slow at times. Needs a lot more QoL changes but it's clear the devs have moved on. Examples: - There is a bug every time you come back from looking around the map that has a chance to softlock the entire game. - Abomination (optional boss) gives nothing upon defeat, in fact that whole planet should be avoided entirely. - Most synergies just aren't viable. - Combo skills are underwhelming and basically not worth using. - Buffs that come up extremely often don't do anything for all but like 2 characters maybe (regen shields+++) and places where they should work, they don't. - RNG is your biggest enemy and there's no sort of refresh system if you get screwed on rewards. - Unlocks are underwhelming and the equipment all kind of feels mostly the same - Predictions are wrong a lot of the time and don't account for a lot of moves - Mechanics are poorly explained in descriptions and don't display anything in predictions This is one of those games that really suffers from the dev mentality of limiting what you can do generally. You're kind of meant to grasp at little peanuts of efficiency and power while you struggle every step of the way. And while that keeps the difficulty high no matter what you're strategy is, it also just kind of makes everything feel underwhelming and same-y. And in a game that's heavily reliant on luck, your runs can just get tanked for nothing basically. Which is made even worse by just how long a single run can take. Either way, great game. Needs a complete overhaul on equipment buffs / general balancing. Refresh mechanic of some kind. General QoL with skipping repeated dialogue and speeding gameplay up. And I feel like they really missed an opportunity on the progeny. I was stoked to find out why bandit+robot = four-armed assassin but there's literally nothing to explain it. Did they adopt her? Train her? Surrogate? No clue

However good the game may be, it is buried under a big pile of jankiness, weird decisions, odd designs and controls and overall questionable user experience.

One of the best turn-based battle system ever. Very tactical and less RNG-reliant. Too bad development is dropped and no more content update. After over 150hrs I still want to see more of this world.

Gameplay is fun, the art is good, the music is good... but the story and dialogue? Yeah, I just can't. Again, wish there were more options than just Yes Or No on Steam.

Game bugged in the first mission after the tutorial, completely unplayably, and autosaved in the unplayable state. Needs more stability first :(

Coming back after a few years to leave this review, thinking back on how good this game is, and how it was a disservice for me not to review it. Im a big turn-base, roguelite enjoyer and this game was one of the ALL TIME greats. Incredible design, very unique and the combat is so engaging. I had my preferred team, but at a certain point ALL the heroes felt meaningful. Depending on the team comp, the difficulty, each character has something they excel at, which is good because the game finds fun and interesting ways to push you to use everyone. Im not familiar with whoever made this game, but whoever it is, Bravo. I will play anything else you make.

Amazing impressions after overcoming the introduction, nice art, good tactics, worth trying.

Ursprünglich habe ich Star Renegades für mein Steam Deck gekauft – und es hat mich komplett überrascht. Der fantastische Pixel-Art-Style und vor allem das Kampfsystem haben mich sofort überzeugt. Die Kämpfe fühlen sich taktisch, dynamisch und unglaublich befriedigend an. Die Story startet stark, flacht zwischenzeitlich zwar etwas ab, entwickelt sich aber selbst nach über 50 Stunden nochmal weiter und schafft es dadurch, langfristig interessant zu bleiben. Besonders gefallen hat mir auch, dass das Spiel sich selbst nicht zu ernst nimmt und immer wieder charmanten Humor einbaut. Wer auf taktische Roguelites mit Stil, guten Kämpfen und motivierendem Fortschritt steht, sollte sich Star Renegades definitiv anschauen.