I might play hard-bitten skeptic, but when you hit me with an idea like “What if we made Space Invaders but it was kind of a deckbuilding roguelike and instead of a spaceship, you had a mech?” …I’m in, you son of a bitch.
StarVaders
Developer: Pengonauts
Price: $24.99
Platform: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
StarVaders is exactly that: There’s a grid of tiles. You generally want to defend the bottom, but you can bounce all over the board. Weird alien creatures are invading, they come in from the top and advance towards the bottom. You want to shoot them before they get to the bottom. Remember when games were simple like that? Also, we drank from the hose and ate lead paint.
The cards and deckbuilding, and roguelike mechanics–things like artifacts and upgrading cards, and item shops–are where you get that twist on the basic formula. You may start with basic attacks like “shoot up”, but it doesn’t take long before you get things like bombs (they explode, big surprise, and take out an area), or attacks that move things around like the aliens or even your mech, slamming them against the edge of the map or into each other, potentially fatally, or shots that split, or shots that ricochet, or shots that go diagonally, or…or…or…
You go from “skulking around the bottom shooting upward”, as in the days of hose drankin’, to bouncing around like a maniac firing in all directions, firing off bombs, using your mech like a bomb, to setting up ridiculous angling ricocheting shots that send your enemies all bouncing and careening into each other while the high energy electronic music bleeps and bloops away cheerfully in the background. Pulling off a board-clearing combo is a lot of fun. Getting caught because of a doom-spewing flower in the back row you forgot about is infuriating. The whole thing is a lot of fun without being so high stakes that you’re thrown into a rage when you lose.
…Doom-spewing? Oh yeah! The idea is that if the aliens get to the bottom rows, they’ll start bringing Doom. Get 5 Doom, and the aliens win, and your run is over. Doom is also persistent, and while there are ways to reduce it, it’s pretty difficult to do, so this is the ticking clock hovering ominously over every run. But not every enemy has to get to the back row to start adding to the Doom counter. Some can add to Doom just by existing, the dream of every goth or everyone who has ever sung the Doom Song.
The enemy design is a hoot. It’s like cheerful, colorful, weirdo aliens, the kind of thing you’d find in a cheap pack of erasers for third graders. Slimes that split! Plants that spawn doom! Creepy spiders that spawn webs! Little gun-shaped things that shoot lasers! Little shielded turtle-looking guys that detonate all the tiles around them when they blow up! Weird alien bees!
Some don’t shoot. Some do shoot. Some spawn other enemies. Some explode. Some have shields. Some move fast. Some have immunity to certain attacks. It’s quite varied, but always fair. Some split like slimes. Some are long snake-like creatures and have to be beaten a segment at a time. Some put cards in your deck that do weird things to screw with you. Some spawn clouds that absorb attacks. Some give you temporary Doom for the encounter only, rather than persistently, but pay much better than normal enemies. Temptingly. SO TEMPTING.
Mechanically, it’s the usual formula. You have a deck and get cards either by winning encounters or in the occasional shop. It’s easy enough to intuit the strategies. I figured out pretty quick I liked a bomb strategy (throw explosive bombs on the board that I can shoot and explode and clear the board) with lots of projectiles (more bullets flying around to hit and explode my bombs) but I could also see paths to lots of movement (bounce around the board shooting stuff) and high burn rate (sacrifice cards but get more chances to play and hopefully wipe out the invaders before you run out of cards) and other strategies very easily. I’m very bad at Magic: the Gathering and figured this out pretty quickly. There’s a random element to every run, of course, and then there are things to unlock along the way, more incentive to level up.
There are 2 difficulty levels to unlock, 2 pilots to unlock that play differently, 2 mechs to unlock that play differently, new aliens and bosses to unlock that play differently, and the usual array of new cards, new artifacts, and surprise upgrades like “you can go from tipping the cranky girl running the shop to playing the gacha machine for upgrades if you tip her well enough”. In-game only, not The Bad Kind of Gacha.
It’s a fun little game with a surprising amount of depth, an upbeat soundtrack, interesting and cute enemy design, lots of stuff to unlock, and, of course, DOOM doom DOOM doom doom DOOM DOOM doom. The roguelike deckbuilder still has some twists, like Space Invaders with a mech.
The Final Word
StarVaders is a creative and polished fusion of roguelike, deckbuilder, and arcade-style mechanics. While it’s built on a familiar formula, the vibrant design, strategic depth, and sheer fun of chaotic, combo-driven gameplay make it an easy standout in the genre.
MonsterVine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 – Great
