After playing several action-focused demos over the last few days, I thought I’d round out the week with a roguelike deckbuilder, and StarVaders was sitting pretty in my inbox. I was immediately drawn to the borderline cuteness of the screenshots, which are quite illustrative I think, and then the press copy sold me on the game’s promise of an epic battle between mechs and aliens.
StarVaders is a roguelike deckbuilder, sure, but it’s also turn-based Space Invaders with mechs and machine guns. Everything plays out on a narrow grid, and as with the arcade classic, your enemies appear at the top of the screen and then edge down towards you, in this case one round at a time.
In StarVaders you get a heads-up about what the enemy units are planning to do each turn. In your hand is a selection of cards, and they include actions such as move, shoot, and throw grenade. Your assembled hand of cards gives you a limited range of options, but generally you can move and attack at least once.
Cards have an associated cost – measured in “heat” in this instance – and so it’s a case of making the most of your hand, playing cards to move your little mecha friend on the grid in order to dodge incoming attacks, and then letting rip on your enemies wherever possible.
There are also these cool purple “chrono tokens” that you can spend if you mess up, which I did a couple of times, and these reset you to the beginning of that action and let you have another go. During your turn you also have the opportunity to play special attacks. For example, as you can see in the screenshot, the first card (on the left) is an attack that splits on impact and hits anything adjacent to the target, too. The three aliens highlighted in red are all going to get it.
Once again referring to the screenshot above, certain enemies have blue glowing shields that need to be stripped before the unit underneath can be damaged.
Meanwhile, as you’ll note in the screenshot below, there are bosses to overcome, too. You’ll need to have added a few options to your hand to get through these challenging encounters, but on the way to these battles there are stores to shop in and opportunities to level up the cards you’ve already collected.
Overall, I thought the Steam demo was good fun and it made a really strong case for a wishlist and future consideration. StarVaders has taken a classic concept and revived it with a mash-up of roguelite replayability and turn-based tactics. I’m definitely looking forward to playing the finished game when it lands in spring, 2025.
