When you think of the most impactful early video games, a long list of games likely come to mind. Games like Pong, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, that all paved the way for the industry we love today and entertained the masses before most people reading this were born. One of the earliest gaming memories I have is of playing Space Invaders with my dad, and fighting off the alien menace with my little ship and its mighty lasers. I found myself thinking of this simpler time while playing StarVaders for preview, which is admittedly a totally different game that also features slowly descending aliens.
In StarVaders your goal is to save the Earth from alien invaders using a badass mech suit, all in a roguelike deck building package. Once you’ve chosen a starting mech and deck you’re thrown onto the battle lines, and it’s time to start fighting. There’s a little story surrounding the action, but for the most part this game throws you into the fights nice and quickly.
Battles in StarVaders take place on a grid, and you’ll need to use your cards (and the heat resource it costs to play them) to move and blast any incoming aliens. Once your turn is up the enemies will move downwards, and if it’s one of the first few turns extra aliens will come flooding onto the battlefield. If any aliens reach the bottom three rows they’ll deal a point of doom to you, and if you gather five of these you’ll lose the run and the Earth will fall. It’s a really compelling system that blends tactics and card gameplay beautifully.
At the start of your time with StarVaders you’ll have a deck that’s mainly made up of single shots and movement cards, but you’ll gain a selection of extra cards as rewards throughout the run. There are huge cones of fire that can clear out multiple enemies at once, bombs that can be thrown and detonated with a shot at any time, and projectiles that break apart into multiple bullets to spread into the masses, and they’re so satisfying to use effectively.
Like any good roguelike there’s the potential to create a build where powerful passive artefacts and cards work together to create broken combos. One of my favourite combinations involved spawning three random bombs at the start of each battle, and increasing all my bomb blast radiuses at the cost of heat when throwing them. Once I added in a few different bomb types into my deck those aliens didn’t stand a chance, and I exploded my way to victory.
As well as worrying about your own cards and upgrades, you’ll also need to pay attention to the enemies you’re fighting. Different aliens have different abilities you have to deal with, be it splitting into multiple blob monsters when blasted or the ability to shoot lasers down at you. You always get a peek at the type of enemies you’ll be dealing with in the next fight you choose too, so if one enemy type is tough for your deck to deal with you can always try and avoid them.
As is tradition in deck building Roguelikes, you’re able to choose your next encounter from a selection of two or three. Each will have a different reward on offer, with the better rewards tied to the harder fights. There’s also a shop in each section where you can spend hard earned currency (which you get more of for flashy multikills) on cards and artefacts to really power up, and a boss that’ll push you to the limit.
These tough fights will easily end a run if you’re not careful, and when your back is against the wall you’ll need to take advantage of Chronos tokens. These powerful coins can rewind a turn, and grant you a new hand which will hopefully contain more useful cards. You can also use these to reroll rewards, but with only three at your disposal at any one time they shouldn’t be spent lightly.
In this preview I was only able to play as the first two classes in the game, but it was easy to see quite how much content will be packed into the full game when it releases on April 30th. Permanent unlocks can be obtained by levelling up classes, as well as spending your spare cash on new cards at the shop. There are even multiple unlockable difficulties, and given it took me many many runs to succeed on the second of these you can guarantee a lot of challenge awaits you on this space adventure.
StarVaders is such an entertaining Roguelike that’s seriously hard to put down, and is full to the brim with clever mechanics. The tactics style gameplay blends perfectly with the card side of the game, and there are so many great build options to construct that’ll blast those aliens to dust. I’m so excited to experience everything this game has to offer later this month, and you should be too.
StarVaders is coming to PC on April 30th.
