A good modern blobber.

Starcrawlers is an interesting game. It punches above its weight and in many ways I think it's more ambitious that it should have been in others. Still, it provides near endless content in a smooth and slick presentation.

It starts with a team of four (out of seven classes) heading to a derelict space cruise liner in a basic salvage mission. I thought this was just a one-off intro but it turns out to be the centerpiece of the game; practically every story mission is a return to the same cruise liner. It makes me think this game was originally intended to be a megadungeon just exploring that one place. There's even a mission with a special dimensional shifting mechanic, just for that one part of the cruise ship, and then never occurs again. The final battle is also a baffling wtf and I don't think storytelling is this dev's strong suit.

In between this is a mission based game with procedural content, almost like Shadowrun in space. You take on contracts for various megacorps against their rivals and rake in money and loot in the process. Once you beat it the level cap increases and you can do it all again with even more challenge and rewards, and then do it again with an even high cap. New game plus plus. It feels otherwise detached from the story and almost like two separate games crammed together. But it's plenty fun running these missions and experimenting with the game's highly inventive classes and combat system.

The game does have some flaws:

-The faction reputation system is horrid. Every mission you gain rep with some faction and lose it with another. However along the mission if you loot most treasure you find you will lose even more rep, but not gain any. This compounds the reputation loss until everyone in the galaxy hates you. The only way to avoid this is to just not pick up any loot, which sucks.

-The classes have a lot of depth and options but some abilities and combos are so strong they dominate way too easily (void psyker). Once you figure out a tactic that works you pretty much repeat it in every battle for the rest of the game.

-The limit of 5 active abilities per character makes leveling past a certain point feel meaningless.

-Too dependent on good loot. Your weapons determine all your damage but sometimes I went 10 or more levels before finding an upgrade. The shops are unreliable and loot in missions is pretty sparse.

Overally a good game. The developer went on to make a single character roguelike set in the same universe. It looks interesting but it's not what I was hoping for, I'd like a real Starcrawlers 2.