It's an interesting game, but feels a bit random and short. By the time you randomly receive the right units to make a decent combo, the missions are over and you reset everything and have to start over

I really wanted to like this game. I enjoyed the demo very much. So I bought it on release day. Then I played it. They added a new mechanic to a henchmen (basic) unit that is a game killer. It has a legendary support unit that allows you to only draw 1 energy card per turn. This is a run killing mechanic and it is beyond me why they would want to include this in the game. It is nearly impossible to beat this unit. You can hang out and do nothing while you build up energy and take damage, and you might get enough energy to do a few points of damage before you die, but you are going to die. The dev claims they may turn this into an "elite" unit, but that label won't help, because your run will end anyway. Bad mechanics are bad and this game sucks because of it. I wouldn't waste my money. There are better games out there. I requested a refund and got it.

Here lies the lone pilot past his prime. Outnumbered and outgunned. Murdered by numbers.

temu FTL

It's good fun and nice mechanics. But was hyped way too much in the reviews as an "FTL successor". It's more like a puzzle game than a deep strategic decision making rpg in space like FTL. So, for disappointed expectations, I give it thumbs down.

I am torn on this one. Don't let the theme and presentation fool you. It's a game about math equations. You stack up your numbers and the enemy does the same and there is a bunch of increasingly complex modifiers/possibilities as you acquire more units (items), treasures (passives) during a run. You also start with some inherent and randomised traits (also passives). But if a fight is not going according to your plan you can retreat and change or reposition every unit and have another crack at the equation. Enemies are diverse and each represents a different challenge that has to be approached differently. The game is very addictive and has that "just a bit more" feel to it. So why the negative review? Because Steam doesn't allow a neutral one. I am probably very bad at the game but... I feel like the novelty wears off fast and you are left with all the flaws. The biggest strength of the game are also its biggest flaws and are all connected. You see each enemy revolves around a certain theme. And your ship, pilot, units (items), and treasures (passives) are pieces of your possible response. One enemy might limit all damage taken from direct fire to 1 but has low health. So you either have to consistently outgun him for some time or destroy him with another source of damage. What I am trying to say is that there are certain strategies and combinations that render each enemy very much dead. And some that are useless against them. So the game can be really inconsistent difficulty-wise. You do see a portion of your future enemies so you can prepare in advance. But with the exception of one item you cannot reroll enemies nor pick "a path" like many of these games allow. Once you start going for a certain build with items and passives the game can throw an enemy designed to counter that. You can manage to rearrange your ship and win (and it feels good) but sometimes I am just unable to do so. Since you can't see all enemies or reroll them reliably you can get screwed hard in the 2/3 and 3/3 of the run. This feels incredibly frustrating and takes a lot of time. Bosses do feel like bosses but represent the same problem just worse. You often end up in a situation where RNG screws you and you simply do not have the tools to get through the fight even if you steamrolled everything before this enemy. There are people on the forums that claim (and I believe them) 90+ % on difficulty 9. I didn't win once on that difficulty. And believe me I tried. I might just be stupid. That is very possible. But I simply feel the game doesn't give you enough opportunities to flesh out your build on higher difficulties. Considering game's meta-progression is unlocking new pilots and laser colors and those eventually all happen anyway there is nothing to grind for to justify sinking so much time into runs that end in defeats. So I am left with banging my head against the wall or playing custom. The game just feels like a brick wall. Every fight goes according to one of three possible: 1) I steamroll the enemy. So I am either playing on an easy difficulty or simply happened to have what I need to counter the enemy. 2) I win but take some damage and consume more fuel than gets automatically restored. This just means I am weakened going into the coming fights. 3) I lose seeing no possible way to avert that. With careful consideration and some major reshuffles (which you should consider for every enemy, don't let your mind chain you into one set up) I can sometimes turn 3) into 2) or 2) into 1). Those are the battles that feel so much fun. Because you realise how you can re-shuffle everything and use it differently and it just works. What would I change if I were the dev team: 1) Introduce a "path" system or a reliable way to reroll enemies. It feels like a player is punished for experimenting and specialising because that limits the possible options to deal with enemies. And since the enemies are all different going into a specific build means some of them start countering you hard. 2) Allow me to turn off treasures just like I can take off units. With items I can at least take them off and position them differently but your passives are eternal and can pre-screw you going into a fight. 3) Implement a "step back" button. My brain is small and sometimes I want to try things and then would like to go back. I can literally retreat and start the same battle again (including what energies are rolled if I am not mistaken) so why can't I go back a step or several? 4) Improve tooltip texts. Some of them are unclear or misleading. 5) Add a few more music tracks. What's there is great but gets repetitive. As I wrote at the beginning I am torn. I had a lot of fun but the more I try to play the more frustrated I get. I do recommend giving it a try or watching a few videos though.

I found this game via Esty8Nine's stream and absolutely love it. Today, I finished the climb with the first ship to defeat the highest difficulty currently in the game (I think). After doing so, I was reminded that everything wasn't in the game since its not 1.0 yet, which I completely forgot that this was technically early access as of right now. Which is truly a testament to the quality that currently exists in the game. I love everything about the game with 1 small exception. The game NEEDS an undo button. I understand that undo adds complications if an action reveals additional information, then an undo can be used to game the system. I'm not sure if the answer is to just turn off undo if an action like that takes place or just allow a certain number of undos per fight. Having the ability to infinitely reset the fight is not an adequate solution.

Boring!

PC

- Intel i9-10850K @ 3.60GHz - RTX 3080, 2560x1440 @ 144hz - 32GB RAM - Win10

Game Summary

Very much inspired by other Roguelike Deckbuilders such as Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon. You have quite a few characters to unlock and play with and given the large variety of ship attack/support modules and treasures, there's a lot of possible ways to build your ship. You pick a ship, you pick a character that determine a bonus or ship behaviour and then you alternate between doing battles and looking for upgrades/shop upgrades. Rinse and repeat until you beat all the bosses. Level up to unlock different ships and characters. The battles involve you trying to outdamage the enemy per lane, with a fuel resource allowing you to dodge lanes and shields recharging between battles allowing you to soak up extra damage per round. But as charming as the game is overall, I do have a few gripes with it and most stem from how luck-based Roguelike Deckbuilders work in general.

Criticisms and Feedback

- The difficulty is all over the place and there is little to no balance. There are bosses with so much guard you cannot possibly break them before they use their special attack. There's also a lot of super weak and super strong generic enemies. Especially early on it can be quite challenging. - The music is a bit lacklustre, giving off a mellow "Space Western" vibe. Huge missed opportunity for more relaxing trance or tense techno vibes to go along with the flashy laser cannons in battles. - Lonestar follows the trend of difficult luck-based Roguelike (Deckbuilder) games. This causes the following issues: A. you have to play for quite a while to slowly unlock all characters, ships and other attainable bonuses before you can even expect to play with good builds, B. a lot of the upgrades you encounter aren't upgrades at all and are worse than your starting equipment and reward choices are often a gamble with a high chance of giving you nothing or or something bad and C. to beat the more difficult levels/bosses you will still need to rely on a good bit of actual luck during your runs. Lonestar is much more of a luck-based Roguelike game like Darkest Dungeon, where good runs are fully dependent on a rare streak of good luck. To me luck/gambling are not fun game elements. My feedback to developers of such games is that diluting progression and making players rely on being lucky is just delaying the gameplay for the player. This actually makes it less appealing for me to play more of the game. If I have more control over assets at my disposal I feel a lot better about myself than knowing that the game just ended my run early because it refused to provide me with enough boons I need to challenge the boss of a level. Why would I even bother attempting the final boss if I know I don't have the resources to take it on? There's a reason most physical card games rely a lot on "search" cards because if those didn't exist you just become dependent on the luck of drawing things in the right order. This "searchability" is also a must for Roguelike games to prevent cheesing the player with luck, it's not very fun to constantly get dealt a bad hand. Unfortunately as far as I've played Lonestar so far, there seems to be no "searchability" whatsoever.

Verdict

My gripes with Roguelike Deckbuilders that rely on luck aside, overall it's a well-made game. If you like Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon there's a fair chance you will also enjoy Lonestar. But just keep in mind that it falls more to the luck category with a serious lack of control over your assets, like Darkest Dungeon. If you do not like luck-based Roguelike games, then I cannot recommend you this game. Personally, I am not enjoying Lonestar as much as I thought I would with 2 hours of playtime. I'm very much on the fence on giving a final recommendation or not. It's not a bad game. However, it being so reliant on luck-based gameplay pushes me over the edge and not recommend this game (unless you specifically like the luck aspect of these types of games, failing dozens of times and just having random builds to see how far you get every single time).

I really pictured this as an interesting twist or spiritual successor to FTL, but it falls FAR short. The mechanics are interesting but overwhelmingly poorly implemented. There's no attempt at balance, and more than a few times if feels like the game actively punishes you for finding an interesting or powerful combo. It eventually gets to the point where it's impossible to beat a level even with multiple power-ups unlocked and on the easiest possible difficulty. Don't get me wrong, the game shouldn't handhold you through every mission with ease. But it should be POSSIBLE to win if you're being tactical and utilizing interesting combos. The only good thing is I got this on sale, so it's not as much of a waste of money as if I had paid full price. But hopefully others can avoid even that loss.

Every game mechanic on in its own is nice. But together as a game - as this game? I am not (yet) feeling it. While I had some fun the first 4 hours felt kinda shallow and left me a bit bored.

I play a lot of these types of games and generally like roguelite deckbuilders. Lonestar diverges from the standard card based system in favor of multiple systems that interact to accomplish a similar thing. Instead of spending energy to play cards, you build up your ship with units, which are either support or attack based. Each turn you "draw" energy which is randomized that you can use to fuel your units. After you have loaded up all of your units, the combat resolves with the difference between your power and the enemy ship's. The systems are very complicated and deep. I imagine that I am bad at the game, as it felt very hard compared to other similar games. What I liked: * Devs took a chance and genuinely tried to mix things up vs the standard card formula. * Unit fuel system is interesting and changes the way that you would think about ship upgrades / card removal. Card removal comes in the form of changing the numerical or colors of the energy you can use for your units. * Units have deep mechanics which interact with each other and have a lot of power * Vacation system allows lots of choice for how you want to increase player power outside of combat What I didn't like: * Energy draw is really low at just 3 per turn. I feel that i have very little player agency within the combat. * Most enemies felt like "special type" enemies with some sort of gimmick rather than just a normal fight. I felt that I had to aggressively read each part on the enemy ship to not lose. * The game is really hard * No "undo" when assigning energy to units. The impact of this for me is that each of my turns become really planning focused and I have to do tons of quick math before I press anything. This is different from games like STS as there is an overwhelming amount of synergies or "do this in this order" type things with how your ships function. This killed the game for me and made it feel like some grade school math game than something i would want to play

I want to like the game, it's got an allure to it, but the balance is too poor to enjoy. Math Tide have cranked up the RNG on this to 11. Your ability to have a successful, yet still challenging run is completely based on chance more than strategy. What attack & support units drop when you kill an enemy, the enemies themselves, what treasures you can or cannot get to buff you, ect. They simply lack the balance that you find in many other roguelike alternatives like a Slay the Spire or Monster Train. It's clear they're aware of this and instead of tackling the challenge of balancing it better, they offer a seed system for the generated runs. Players can simply punch in seeds to generate more favorable runs. The trade-off though? Locks you out of achievements and progression system. The game is a great start, but needs some balancing. Other turn-based roguelikes out there are more worthwhile, even at double the price.

Overhyped, and pretty shallow and boring. It's a numbers game without a story or real progression, touched up with a bit of chrome and graphics. Would be great at 2 bucks, but it's not so great at the current price.

The game is way too easy for a rogue like. I won on my first try ever playing. So the meta progression of unlocking stuff wasn't interesting because I really didn't have to figure out anything. Things get harder as you gain more levels and difficulty. But it does so in the wrong way. Like the bosses which and just gimmicks which force you to retreat and change your build to answer their gimmick or be completely crushed. Some bosses are great, like the one that revives and gets stronger and stronger with each revive. You have control when you kill them and trigger their revive. You are giving options in that fight. This is not the case for nearly any other boss because they just cheese you. You have to retreat and keep changing your build to both not die to their cheese while dealing enough damage. It isn't the type of difficulty I am looking for because the game is essentially a puzzle. If you don't retreat and just eat the lost, than your just do trial and error the long way. I don't feel like I am building a unique build most of the time when I know if I just change my layout I would win the fight. I lost the excitement to go for another run because it just felt to trivial to fight enemies and I didn't "feel" any of the countless of unlocks I got from winning. The combat system doesn't feel deep enough to look and be like "yea, I can make another fun build if I went for another run". Your numbers kinda just hit a point where you win and it doesn't fit an interesting power fantasy for me to be fully invested into why my number hit the winning threshold. Also, I can't stress enough the boss cheese that deletes your builds really killed the imaginative builds journey. Game felt closed in that way. Going against any of the three bosses who lock your stuff if you do said condition and the countless battles where you either win instantly or get completely countered and crushed really drove that home.

It's OK, but it's a £3 game, not a £10 game.

Hard to get into. The games can run pretty long, the rules (and/or the translations) are murky, some aspects of the game don't work like you'd expect (you can't sell at the shop, you can't cancel/go back on a decision if you change your mind). There are also just lots of weird UI decisions that make it hard to track what's going on. For example, the tooltip that shows what a unit does will always block the point values in the middle, so it's hard to tell where to place energy. It's not a bad game, but it's not the roguelike I'll be sinking dozens of hours into like I was hoping. Edit: They got someone from the community to translate into English, but honestly, there are still a lot of grammatical errors and weird phrases (for example, "Enemies Turn" instead of "Enemy's Turn"). I'm not sure whether the process is ongoing or the person's English just isn't up to snuff, but I did not notice an improvement.

I guess I'm just too dumb for this game.. kept trying but it's just not fun.. like.. it's just RNG the game with fancy beam effects? I love me some roguelikes as much as the next guy but what even is this gameplay loop?

It gets boring and repetitive pretty quickly. Definitely not worth the price.

Game isn't bad, but it's incredibly easy, kind of ruins the fun. You only have to defeat three bosses each run before the game is over, so by the time things scale and actually begin to get harder, the game is over. Personally feel like there should be at least two more bosses each run. This game could turn into something great if more is added. As is, there is just too little to the game.

I have seen this compared to FTL a lot, but it's more like a Costco-brand Cobalt Core. It shares the same concept of position-based weapon firing lanes. What is unique here is that your attacks directly cancel the enemy attacks in the same lane--biggest number wins. So your defense is quite literally your offense. Overall, the game is pretty good and has a solid selection of weapons, support modules, events, player pilots, and enemies. It could use a few more player ships though. Two isn't enough. My biggest complaint is that it has been too easy so far. Someone new to these kinds of games will struggle, but experienced players will destroy it from the first run. I have not yet reached an ascension level that I would consider hard yet, and I can't say whether it will pick up. Overall, Lonestar is well-designed and polished with gameplay elements that bring something unique to the genre, and a high level of quality that is a bit below the true heavyweights. It's definitely worth picking up if you need something new to kill a few nights with, and even though it is EA, it already has enough content.

+10 Great indie game -4.9 Script writer likes digimon final score: 5.1/10

The English provided in this game makes very little sense, and will make you scratch your head as you try to understand it. It's obvious that the developer is not a native speaker. I got a Legendary attack component called "Double-Edged Battleaxe". I upgraded it. And it doesn't work as advertise. I load energy into it and there's no "Power" trigger. The game feels very cool, but the accessibility is seriously dragged down by the badly written in-game info.

Do yourself a favour, don't buy this game. Some of the final bosses are extremely gimmicky and require very specific setups to beat. Let me give two examples of gimmicky bosses. One of these bosses, (destructor), destroys the frontmost column of your 3x3 grid every 3 turns, and in 9 turns, one of its attack units gets 99 strength. This requires an extremely fast scaling setup, but the problem with this is that RNG sometimes doesn't give you the pieces that can solve the boss. Another of these bosses copies the value of the first orange/blue/white energy you load and adds it to its attack units. This boss requires you to have support units to bait out the copy gimmick, so that the boss copies a small number instead of a large number. In addition, on the third turn, you can only play three energy cards, which means you need to have a self sustaining setup that can scale well by turn 3. The problem with this is that the final boss is only revealed when you are 4 fights away from fighting it, which gives you little or no time to tinker with your build. Even if you do know the final boss at the start of the round, getting the necessary pieces of the puzzle is still heavily reliant on RNG. Boss information for all galaxy bosses needs to be made known at the start of the game, not at the very end. Devs need to increase the consistency of runs, simply by increasing the odds of getting unit pieces crucial for the final boss fight. Bosses are overtuned and need to be toned down further.

Needs to be way higher difficulty - Im a worse-than-average player, and I beat the game on my first try. There's still more, and it's a good game, but i wouldnt say it's challenging. Good concepts and fun gameplay loop, but difficult to recommend currently but maybe once released it'll have been adjusted enough to be challenging