Storm Lancers

I played the demo first and really liked what I saw: smooth gameplay, a nice art style, and a cool core mechanic. Unfortunately, after buying the full release, the game has been a pain to play. It stutters/freezes every few seconds, making it hard to enjoy. I tried several fixes and looked around online, but couldn’t find a working solution—either I’m one of the few affected, or the game is still too new for reliable troubleshooting. For now, I can’t recommend it. I’d suggest waiting until performance and stability improve, then giving it a try.

Really good game, but sadly a bit short

If you want this game, only get it while it's on sale, after 100%-ing the game I can say with relative ease that it is not worth $20. That being said, it is a decently fun gameplay experience aside from the bugs making achievement hunting a total slog. I admit I had some skill issue moments that made the achievements to finish the game without taking any damage take far longer than it should have, but skill issue aside, the achievements were painful to get on account of several bugs, none of which proved game-breaking, but enough to result in me taking damage and having to restart the run, many times. The good: Fortunately, restarting runs wasn't particularly problematic because the combat and movement mechanics are very nice (with the exception of the elevator on level 4 where the game struggles to attach your character to a moving map tile which causes movement problems). The fighting is not particularly complicated, although there are techs to improve damage application and survival like anywhere else. There's a decent variety of enemies to fight, each stage is more challenging than the next, and there are a few ways to cheese getting OP gear at the start. While it is easy to learn the telegraphs that enemies present, the number of weapons (each with a unique hit pattern, attack speed, and damage) and "consumables" you can use give a decently expansive variety of playstyles. There is most definitely a META as far as weapon choice, although I'm not sure where all of them actually fit, in 24 hours, I have only come across the grenade launcher, rocket launcher, and high-tier version of the Ion Marbles gun a cumulative total of 4 times, although unfortunately the rocket launcher does not perform particularly well. The game is decently easy to pick up and stop and play while you have time, which is something I look for in roguelike games, although, in the case of this game that's not entirely a good thing. The bad: The game is... short. Even a full 100% clear of every enemy on every level only takes about an hour, and you can speed run the game in under 20 minutes (there's even an achievement for it). A lot of roguelike games I've played actually follow a 5-10 level map, but usually each of those zones has about 5 zones/sublevels. This game has 5 levels, putting it on the lower end of content, level 1 only has 1 zone/sublevel, level 2 has 2 parts (east side and west side), level 3 has 2 parts (bottom and top) although the map as a whole is quite small, level 4 actually has 3 parts (drill access, recharge, route between drill and level 5), and level 5 is quite massive and has 4 parts (bottom area, ascent, middle area, second ascent ending at the final boss room). That much content is nothing to scoff at... it's just... unlike most roguelikes that offer a fresh experience every run, there is very little variation with the exception what crates and enemies are going to spawn at given spots. Level 2 has 2 "challenge rooms" that vary with each run but the map is otherwise the same. Level 3 has 2 similar versions of the bottom area. Level 4 has some small variation of the drill access route and recharge route, but even then it's only like 2 options each and both options are basically the same. Level 5 actually has a decent number of map tiles, it feels like 10 areas of the map can be different each run with a good amount of variety, but they are all functionally the same each run as a result of the defined map layout, a pillar is a pillar regardless of where the platforms are. The game definitely doesn't feel incomplete, it's well-rounded as far as its own internal design, every implemented concept has variety and scaling power, it's just that other than the weapon and enemy variety, the other things that have multiple options don't have a lot of options, the "stormbindings" in particular are a part of the game that could stand to have more attention put towards it. They serve as min-max buff/debuff picks, but despite there being a ton of stats across all the equips, they only mess with a few. There's also like no plot at all, which there doesn't have to be for a roguelike, but the game seems to pretend to have one, alluding to things and being all mysterious so you can figure things out, only to complete the game and find out that there is no lore. My biggest gripe with the game is keybinding. The default controls are alright, but intuitively after playing enough of other games I instinctively attribute "F" to special abilities and "E" to interact, in this game it's the opposite. Keybinds are unmodifiable, resulting in the inability to play coop multiplayer on keyboard with custom keybinds to arrow keys and numbers for MB1/2 rebinds. Don't own a controller? Can't play coop. If play-testers were paid for this, the devs should ask for their money back because whoever play-tested this game did an underwhelmingly lackluster job, either that, or the devs just never corrected the issues, which would be crazy work considering the demo was released about 4 months ago and they somehow haven't fixed these issues in that time despite apparently most of the existing reviews at the time of mine being from people who got early access and would have likely reported them. There are plenty of bugs, just to name a few: - Input registration failures, largely inconsequential, but it makes achievement hunting to clear the game having taken no damage a tedious process to say the least. Fortunately you can quit out of a game and then re-start it at the start of the level and re-try without having to run from scratch, and you can actually do this to re-roll your starter equipment until you get a shield - 'i-frames' (generated by sliding or dashing in air) don't seem to actually grant immunity against the damage dealt by wire obstacles - The telegraph icon before enemies make attacks doesn't always happen - Sometimes enemies are in an alert state before they're even on screen and make attacks before being visibly rendered that realistically can only be evaded if you happened to have already been in an evading state - The higher level fire-breathing dogs can sometimes bug out and spin around while breathing fire and end up damaging you even while standing behind them - Using a 3rd slot "ability" item (they are all categorized as "consumables" but certain items are not consumed and instead have a cooldown, which I am here calling "ability" items) means you cannot use any other ability or consumable until the cooldown expires - The level 3 map, as several other reviews have already pointed out has a bug with a certain shield droid about half-way into the level. For some reason this particular spawn just starts triggering its shield attack repeatedly, which then layers the red sprite/particles ontop of the shield for however long you let it keep doing that along with playing the audio ontop of itself for every activation. I have not had any issues with it crashing my client, perhaps I am simply moving too quickly through the map and it doesn't have enough time to stack enough to be an issue, but it could easily crash the game if left alive. I did have one client crash in 24 hours of gameplay, and it happened after restarting a level like 50 times to re-roll a loot crate, which makes me wonder if there's a data caching issue where something isn't fully cleared when quitting to main menu. - Now I'm not sure if it's a bug or not, but it seems like the sniper weapon (you stand stationary and aim it around on the map) is for console controller only, all attempts I have made to use it with a mouse and keyboard have resulted in it jittering around snapping to random points as though the game is trying to interpret mouse movements as a joystick and failing somewhere along the way. - The level 4 elevator ride is... just... it has so many issues lmao, conceptually it's fine, but the game engine doesn't seem to like running it in the way it was created