Go! Go! GOTY! 2017: Game Six: StarCrawlers

• Game: Juggernaut Games's StarCrawlers.
• Release Month: May. (It's been in Early Access since 2015 though.)
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 8/12.
• Completed: TBA.

Well, this was a pleasant surprise. I've been on a StarCrawlers tear over the past three days, trying to collect my thoughts on what to prioritize first in this rundown. Let's stick with the basics for now: StarCrawlers is an old-fashioned dungeon crawler, of the four cardinal direction kind, set in a sci-fi universe of mega-corporations and anarchists, and employs a slight roguelike element for its "filler" dungeons: those with randomly generated objectives, floor plans, loot and enemies that you can take on for any additional funds or experience levels you might need to prepare for the next pre-generated "story" mission. Each dungeon is comprised of a series of interlocking areas, with the occasional secret or loose item lying around, and the map screen always tells you how much of the current dungeon you have explored - generally speaking, you can leave as soon as you've completed your main objective, but you can also scour the place top to bottom for valuables. The game's combat is more Might & Magic or Wizardry than Legend of Grimrock or Dungeon Master in that it's turn-based, with a separate interface for battles and a turn order determined both by a character's stats and their previous action (a quick buff might put them sooner in the queue, for instance, while a powerful attack would put them much further back).

There's a lot more going on beneath the surface, however, and this is what's simultaneously exciting about the game and what makes it so scrappy. The developers have been tweaking and improving this game for nigh on two years in a protracted Early Access period, developing a game that is effectively endless. You could argue that the chain of story quests, or whatever level cap is currently installed, would make definitive end points - they are what I'm trying to reach before I move onto other games this month - but the game has seen constant updates throughout its existence. This model could easily be expanded with DLC campaigns - I've heard tell that there's some planned - boosted level caps and expanded skill trees to go with them, more "themes" with which to build its randomized dungeons (so far we have the likes of claustrophobic cargo spaceships, rocky mining operations, nightmarish space-age cubicle farm offices, and so on), more types of loot to find, et cetera. Of course, how much time and resources the developers are willing to dedicate to a game that lacks a monthly subscriptions service or microtransactions to pay for itself is anyone's guess, but speaking purely hypothetically it is a sustainable model for a sub-genre generally not known for incremental and procedurally generated content. It recalls to mind Harebrained Schemes's Shadowrun Returns, and how that game was built in such a table-top friendly way that it could incorporate future modular content from its own developers - as seen in their subsequent same-engine "episodes" Dragonfall and Hong Kong - as well as from any number of talented and enthusiastic community creators.

I especially like how rich StarCrawler's combat engine is as of right now. There's six core classes plus a bonus unique NPC class with which to build a party of four, each of which has three skill trees to choose from - you can mix and match, but the number of slots for your character's skill palette is limited so it's usually best to just mainline the one - and each class meshes with the others in various complimentary ways. Even on their own, though, some of these character builds can be formidable. My main character, a cyber-ninja I named "Hackira" because I'm the guy who sucks, is capable of affecting enemies with her own special "combo" currency which accumulates with some attack types and can be spent with others. Accruing five of these combo points and then using the devastating Takedown skill to cash them all in with five concurrent attacks at several times my weapon's normal attack range is a truly effective boss-killer. My hacker, meanwhile, can hit enemies with detrimental viruses - each one applying damage on activation and then on every subsequent turn, as well as adding other debuffs - and has a passive skill that regularly causes her viruses to spread to other enemies, and with more infected enemies the more opportunities to spread further. She can infect enemies with up to three different viruses active at the same time, and then execute the Kill Switch to detonate every single virus for huge amounts of damage... and because my Kill Switch ability is fully upgraded, it simply re-applies all the viruses again, their durations refreshed. It's been a lot of fun building up these characters into devastating powerhouses, seeing how the game's systems feed back into one another, finding ways to combine, say, my soldier's explosives with the cyberninja's combination attacks while ensuring my fourth *mystery character* (since he's a minor story spoiler) can tank out any retribution with his aggro-drawing taunts. The combat's not as easy as I make it sound with these OP badasses: the game has a distinct lack of cheap and easy healing opportunities by design, because it wants you to weigh the risks of losing a character on a routine job if their health is starting to decline too much with the extra money and XP you could make by continuing to empty out the current dungeon. It made the early parts of the game, where my characters didn't yet have all their strongest skills, quite challenging.

Another factor for the game's future growth is in its immense network of mega-corporations and other organizations, some of which are criminal, and how you can build affinity with any of them by completing jobs on their behalf, often to the detriment of your reputation with another corporation if they happen to be in direct competition. The randomized missions will frequently involve stealing tech or classified information from one corporation to give to another, and the player can sabotage their standings further by taking high-value items from the current dungeon and hawking them on the black market, which randomly generates offers from rival corporations for cash, items and/or affinity boosts. The additions and subtractions are a bit too minor for my liking - the most you'll ever earn from a job is a measly +5 with that corp - but there's a huge number of them to choose from and all of them start offering you different kinds of freebies if you work for them long enough. Of course, that also means you'll make a lot of enemies, and while I've yet to see any repercussions from pissing people off the game assures me that my comeuppance is coming. Could be something that the developers intend to implement later, or I've just been lucky so far.

I previously stated that this game is scrappy and ambitious, so that unfortunately means bugs out the wazoo. I've crashed no less than five times, had a case where a saved game refused to load and I had to go back about ten minutes to an earlier save, had my fair share of visual and sound glitches, frequently bump into design bugs like losing my ability to see enemies on the map (earned after hacking a terminal) between saving and reloading the game, and at one point one of my inventory slots was completely inaccessible until I reloaded. That's on top of my usual low-end PC woes, which causes a lot of slowdown if there's enough going on in a battle - with a lot of viruses whirling around and explosives going off, that's a given - and an anxiety-inducing long pause between when the mission is complete and when you see the results screen with the XP and money earned, during which the game has crashed at least once and I'm forever paranoid it'll do so again.

I thought I was completely tapped out with procedural generation this month with the number of roguelikes passing through, but despite its stability issues and the small matter of its repetitive content StarCrawlers gets it right by including a chain of pre-generated story missions that I can work my way towards completing while indulging in the occasional randomized dungeon. In that sense the progress has been a bit more like a Bethesda RPG, where I can either follow the core quest-line back in town or go wandering in the wilderness for identikit dungeons popping up on my compass. The painstakingly crafted and balanced mechanics, implemented and tweaked over a number of months with the help of a patient userbase, has lead to a very well-realized sci-fi dungeon-crawler with a lot more substance than immediately meets the eye.

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