StarCrawlers Released

StarCrawlers, a sci-fi CRPG of the dungeon crawling variety, has officially left Early Access. The game is available on Steam and GOG. The retail price is set at $19.99, or your regional equivalent, however a promotional 25% discount is currently in effect.

Here’s the game’s overview:

Crawlers Wanted: high pay, certain risk. Plausible deniability a must.
Build a crew of renegade adventurers on the fringes of space, taking jobs from megacorps to hunt bounties, sabotage rivals and conduct corporate espionage. If you can navigate the intricate politics of wealth and power, you might just survive long enough to spend your hard-won credits.

You’re a Crawler, and that means you work for those that can pay. Asset recovery, commercial espionage, and mayhem for hire are just a few of your crew’s specialized services. If something shady needs doing, chances are a Crawler will be involved. Succeed and you’ll be rewarded with better pay then any corp drone can dream of. Plus, you’ll earn the respect of the eclectic assortment of merchants, opportunists and adventurers who make their home in the fringes of space.

Key Features:

• Wage strategic battles against futuristic enemies with an innovative time unit turn-based combat system.
• Procedurally-generated dungeons and events create endless replayability.
• Choose your allies and your foes wisely. Your choices will change how the story unfolds.
• Eight player classes each with unique abilities, both in combat and when exploring.
• Randomly generated weapons, armor and gear with upgradeable enhancements.
• Easy to Hardcore difficulty modes and optional permadeath.

Unfortunately there aren’t any reviews of the full version available at the moment, so instead, here are a couple of previews from back when the game just began its Early Access journey:

Destructoid – StarCrawlers is sci-fi dungeon crawling done right:

If you’re familiar with Shadowrun, explaining what Crawlers do for a living isn’t really necessary. For those who aren’t, though, Crawlers work as agents for the highest bidder, taking on jobs such as asset recovery, commercial espionage, and mayhem for hire. These are just a few examples of a Crawler’s specialties — and, of course, all of them are done with the understanding that your shadowy employers will deny any and all knowledge of your existence.

Once you’ve selected your starting character class and made contact with the cybernetically augmented barkeep, Doc Sam, he’ll agree to help you find work, as well as offering to supply you with potential recruits to fill out your roster, but first, he needs your help getting the Wire back online. Here begins the game’s tutorial section where you’ll be tasked to seek out a necessary component for the system in the bar’s basement.

Played from the first-person perspective, movement is controlled with the WASD keys, as well as with Q and E, which allow your characters to turn left and right. While it might seem somewhat self-defeating to do so in a grid-based game, you can also hold down the right mouse button while the cursor is centered on screen to control your point of view, allowing you to look around and move more freely while exploring the map.

As you traverse the game’s first dungeon, the tutorial runs you through some of the basics, such as how to assign skill points and also demonstrates how characters can use their class-specific abilities that allow each to interact with certain objects in the environment, such as an Engineer’s ability to disarm traps.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun – Better Than Scrap:

This is a quibble, however. Combat sometimes feels relentless, or a distraction from your main task of exploration, but it’s rarely boring, entirely thanks to the work that has gone into making each of your crew potent and asymmetric. I’ll get to how the turnbased, time-unit combat system works in a moment, but it’s the skills available to your characters that are the real core of the game: elaborate and deep, interlocking in emergent ways.

These skill trees take time to mine out, however. Each of the classes has three separate tracks of skills, and each tier along each track must be upgraded three times before the next unlocks. All the classes I’ve played so far have a similar central idea, in that each has a resource pool which empowers them, but the relationship between attacking and empowerment varies wildly. Tubsy is my main character, a Void Psyker, who I pick initially because she has a badass helmet: like an aerodynamic goldfish bowl, swimming with purple stars. With every attack she gains Void energy, which in turn empowers her attacks. This makes her an immense damage dealer in mid-to-late combat, but overload her with Void energy, and she’ll pop.

There are various unlockable skills which act as release valves for this energy, but they’re a tier or two down in the skill trees, and it’s painful to forego the advantage of damage output in order to invest in less glamorous skills that’ll eventually get me to those release valves. In fact, I’m supremely impatient to investigate any one of her skill paths: the Voidcaller path is the one that’s essential to her ability to absorb or expend Void energy, but the others are a lot more colourful – her Manipulator track makes her a nightmare for enemies with shields, draining them or overloading them, while the Summoner track allows her to psychically torment her enemies with visions of celestial unrealities.