StarCrawlers Chimera
- May 13, 2024
- Juggernaut Games
- 30h median play time
Get on Steam"StarCrawlers: Chimera" is a sci-fi turn-based RPG where you infiltrate the Chimera BioPharma complex to find Dr. Cerberus. With procedurally-generated floors, various skill trees, and numerous abilities, gear, and enemies, each playthrough offers a unique experience. Choose your difficulty level and engage in tactical combat with 60+ enemy types, while customizing your character with over 200 abilities and 36 skill trees. The game also features permadeath and regular content updates.
PC
Windows
Reviews
- The game features a unique skill system with a wide variety of builds and abilities, allowing for deep customization and replayability.
- The humor and setting are engaging, with entertaining item descriptions and social media posts that add charm to the gameplay.
- The game has solid mechanics for a first-person roguelike, with interesting enemy designs and a rewarding loot system.
- The game suffers from numerous bugs and poor polish, leading to frustrating gameplay experiences and softlocking issues.
- The user interface is clunky and unintuitive, making navigation and inventory management cumbersome, especially with the forced use of the analog stick for movement.
- Combat feels chaotic and confusing, lacking the clarity of turn-based mechanics, which detracts from the strategic elements of gameplay.
- story16 mentions
- 19 % positive mentions
- 63 % neutral mentions
- 19 % negative mentions
The story in the game is largely criticized for being minimal or non-existent, with many players noting a lack of engaging narrative elements, dialogue, and character development. Instead, the gameplay focuses on a single overarching mission within a large dungeon, featuring optional side missions and loot opportunities, which some find entertaining despite the absence of a traditional RPG storyline. Overall, the game is perceived more as a strategy-focused dungeon crawler rather than a narrative-driven experience.
“Sounds stupid, which it also is, but it's very entertaining and provides a funny and immersive background story to the game as well as giving the player more opportunities for loot.”
“This one is a single character dungeon crawler, where Starcrawlers had many different missions; this has one big mission: a dungeon with different big floors, secrets, side missions, and loot.”
“While I get it's the purpose of the game to clear out each floor, I would have loved just random missions to do in between the main storyline.”
“I see lots of people complaining the story is non-existent.”
“There still doesn't seem to be a decent storyline though mostly a strategy game really than anything else.”
“It really shouldn't be called an RPG at all because there's no story, no dialogue, no choice, no characters besides mindless NPCs.”
- gameplay10 mentions
- 30 % positive mentions
- 40 % neutral mentions
- 30 % negative mentions
The gameplay is characterized by a grid-based structure typical of roguelikes, with unique mechanics and a stealth element that allows for strategic decision-making after opening doors. Players appreciate the engaging progression system, build diversity, and solid loot mechanics, making each run feel fresh and experimental. Overall, while the gameplay is decent and offers interesting changes, it may appeal more to fans of dungeon crawlers and those familiar with the genre.
“The developers are clearly aware of this quality and implemented a stealth mechanic, giving you a couple of turns after opening a door to decide how you want to engage.”
“The game's more roguelike structure lends itself well to this kind of gameplay, as each run (no matter if the last one succeeded or ended prematurely) allows you to experiment with other build ideas.”
“I find it engaging because it shares some mechanics with dungeon crawlers, provides a good sense of progression and build diversity, and it has a solid loot system.”
“Even though this game, in gameplay as well as in the UI, is extremely grid-based, as one would expect from a roguelike, they force you to control movement with the analog stick.”
“Gameplay was decent and it's cheap, so... sure, why not.”
“If you liked Starcrawlers, I'd recommend this even though it's a significant departure from the first in terms of gameplay.”
- humor6 mentions
- 100 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 0 % negative mentions
The game's humor is characterized by its quirky writing, clever item descriptions, and entertaining dialogue, which contribute to an immersive experience. Players appreciate the attention to detail and the variety of humorous moments, making the game both funny and engaging. Overall, the humor enhances the gameplay and adds depth to the story.
“The writing and setting are interesting and pretty funny.”
“The attention to detail and the humorous moments in this game are great.”
“Great sense of humor, between the item descriptions, social media posts, dialogue, and even the cute 1337 robot names.”
- replayability5 mentions
- 60 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 40 % negative mentions
Overall, the game offers high replayability through its deep skill trees, diverse starting skills, and procedurally generated levels, encouraging players to experiment with different builds. However, the limited enemy variety may reduce the incentive for multiple playthroughs. Players who enjoy mastering the game will find ample opportunities to replay and refine their strategies.
“Amazing game with tons of replayability, provided you are good enough to beat it!”
“+ high replayability due to the procedurally generated floors & wide variety of starting skills to choose from.”
“Those levels, however, are all huge and there is a ton of replayability since you can pick/mix & match from 36 different skill trees in the character creator.”
“Enemy variety doesn't change much from playthrough to playthrough, so the incentive for replayability is to go with different skill builds.”
“The levels are all huge, but the lack of enemy variety diminishes the overall replayability.”
- grinding2 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 100 % negative mentions
Players find the grinding aspect of the game starts off enjoyable but quickly devolves into a tedious experience, particularly due to the shift to a real-time combat system that leads to repetitive and unengaging encounters. The endgame boss fights are especially criticized for being drawn out and frustrating, contributing to a sense of wasted time.
“It starts off kind of fun, and rapidly becomes more and more tedious, culminating in a series of awful, slow, drawn-out boss fights at the end.”
“They changed the combat system from instanced encounters into that obnoxious 'everything on the map acts at the same time' garbage that turns every single fight into either boring press-1 spam where you're never in any danger and so everything feels like a pointless waste of your time, or a tedious circus performance where you kite everything around the map and open/close doors constantly and other stupid antics like that to delay the hostiles while you abuse cooldown recovery and regeneration.”
- optimization2 mentions
- 50 % positive mentions
- 0 % neutral mentions
- 50 % negative mentions
Overall, the game's optimization is generally strong, with good performance noted until later levels, where some players experience slowdowns due to the developers' ambitious design choices. However, the shift to a real-time combat system has drawn criticism for making encounters feel either monotonous or overly complicated, detracting from the overall experience.
“Performance has been great up until my current floor, which chugs a bit (for good reason though! The developers went kind of all out on this floor, and it's kind of awesome!)”
“They changed the combat system from instanced encounters into that obnoxious 'everything on the map acts at the same time' garbage that turns every single fight into either boring press-1 spam where you're never in any danger, making everything feel like a pointless waste of your time, or a tedious circus performance where you kite everything around the map and open/close doors constantly, engaging in other frustrating tactics to delay the hostiles while you abuse cooldown recovery and regeneration.”
- music2 mentions
- 50 % positive mentions
- -50 % neutral mentions
- 100 % negative mentions
The music in Starcrawlers is praised for its ability to enhance gameplay by providing audio cues for enemy encounters and combat transitions, though some players feel overly reliant on these cues is a drawback. There is a strong desire among fans for the original composer to return for any potential sequels.
“The music cues provide valuable information, helping players understand when an enemy has been spotted and when combat has ended.”
“If Starcrawlers 2 will ever be a thing, then please get the original composer back for the soundtrack!”
“If you listen to the music cues, you get a better idea when an enemy has been spotted (even if you can't see them) and when combat has ended, but it's ridiculous that you have to depend on this.”
- graphics1 mentions
- 0 % positive mentions
- 100 % neutral mentions
- 0 % negative mentions
The graphics are generally considered decent, maintaining a satisfactory level of quality throughout the game.
