TombStar

The game is a top down 3D shooter with rogue lite elements where you control one of the 3 characters to fight the evil guys and save your planet. I wasn’t sure about getting the game at first but it still had something that made me interested enough to give it a try. And boy, am I glad I went for it! It always felt great playing the game and making progress with your upgrades. You level up and earn various enhancements such as badges and the ability to buy new weapons & skills. Badges are permanent upgrades you equip before starting your run. Weapons and skills make a huge difference and you often feel their impact when you find them. The controls are perfect. You move and shoot but there is also a dedicated dodge button, a special move, reload, quick change and manually changing weapons. You can equip up to 5 weapons. Dodging makes you invincible when it’s active but you need to wait until it charges again before you can use it. There are abilities that make dodging far more powerful. Specials can slow enemies down, make your hits critical etc. Each of the 3 characters have unique dodge and specials. They have different default weapons and different stats. I’ve tried all of them and like the female character the most with her Nightbane weapon. Her health is very low though. The devs succeeded at making the play styles distinct and worth trying out. There are 8 levels with each level having a shop, an upgrade room and a weapon room. With the last 2 you’ll need keys that are either bought at the shop or dropped by the enemies. I’ve tried a few rogue lites (Crypt of the Necrodancer and Spelunky) and while I enjoy those games, I don’t like the part where they’re too challenging and there are no options to fine tune how you want to play them. TombStar was no different until the devs patched the game to offer easy mode and the ability to save before continuing with the next level. This makes a world of difference. Easy did not feel easy, it still felt challenging and I had to pay attention to survive. I only managed to complete the game on my 13th run. To me it feels like the perfect difficulty. The ability to save also helped me to get invested and get better at it. You can increase the difficulty or equip special badges that can make your runs a living hell but I love that other players are not forgotten. And once those players are ready for more challenge, they can get it. If I have to think of flaws then I can think of those 3: the levels might look a bit repetitive and samey, the load times might be a bit longer than I’d like and the story is just there. About the first flaw, it’s the most apparent one but it didn’t bother me. I rarely thought of it. The load times might differ depending on your pc. And the story is mostly presented through text that you download in the shop (it’s random whether it’s there but it’s saved when you find those story pieces), one intro cutscene and one short cutscene near the end. The story is generic but you obviously don’t play this game for that. It’s just there to give you a reason to fight and that’s totally fine! I love what the developers did with TombStar. They know how to make a fun game that feels very balanced, challenging but still fair. It’s definitely the kind of game I’d want to return to all the time if I didn’t have a huge backlog. When you just want time to unwind, stop thinking about things and just want to jump straight to the gameplay, then this game is perfect for that.