This game has a lot of potential. I like its style and base mechanics. But it's hard to really see the good parts in this game right now because of some fairly dire problems:

1. Balance. There doesn't seem to be any kind of "base rate" these cards are built on. Like, there's a card that increases shield capacity by 1 for 1 energy. Another card charges shields by 10 for 1 energy. Another card makes a 4/2 drone for 2 energy. There's also a card called "AI Supremacy" that gives you 10 shield capacity, 10 shield charges, and 4 4/4 drones. Going by the established rates, this card should cost at least 19 (ignoring the fact that it also gives you all these effects in one card). Instead it costs 3. Yes it's "mythic"... but that should mean it's maybe twice as good, not 6 or 10 times as good. Having cards this strong makes your strategy and the enemy's strategy irrelevant - you just play your card and win. Things won't be perfectly balanced... but I feel like there could be a better attempt here.

2. Easy Exploits. Like Slay the Spire, it feels like health is a resource that should slowly exhaust through a stage, and most game mechanics here seem to suggest this was the plan. But there's a card that heals you and doesn't "deactivate". This means it's easy to kill all but one enemy, shield up, and loop through your deck until you're healed to full. I think there's one for credits too. You shouldn't be able to get these kinds of effects so easily (ie. with a single card and some patience). Learn the lessons of the other games in this space. These cards should exhaust.

3. Do-nothing events. Whatever is in the mysterious crate, don't have it be nothing. Again, I get this is early access... but I've played the game twice, and it feels like I've opened 6 empty crates. Events don't need fancy graphics or something - just placeholder in _something_.

Anyway, if I was you, dear reader, and if I was looking for a game to play now - I'd add this game to my wishlist, and come back to it once it has had a little more time to bake. But you shouldn't forget it, because I think it could be good.

It has the feel of FTL, but plays similar to slay the spire. The biggest turnoff for me, and what ended up causing me to refund it, is that you don't draw from your deck. Every turn, you get 5 random cards out of the cards in your deck. you could get the same hand over and over; it does not cycle through all the cards. For example, In my 21 card deck, I had one copy of a card that boosts the attack of all your active drones and 3 cards that made drones. In one battle (and the battles are decently lengthy) I drew the drone boost card every turn, but never once did I draw a card that made a drone. It was very frustrating. In addition, energy is not saved between turns but shields are (there is a shield capacity), so you can have totally wasted turns where you draw mostly shields and your shields are already at max so the turn just gets wasted.

In short, I enjoyed FTL and slay the spire but found this to be more frustrating than fun.

As others have stated, FTL meets slay the spire.

HUGE potential here. I think a few things need reworked.

1. Balance: jmzero's review goes in depth.

2. No discard pile: this i feel is an odd design choice, since there's no discard pile, all cards used immediately go back to the deck, so attaining any new card is a constant lower percentile of getting any card in your deck on every turn. So you may never see your new card in play...ever. Since the deck is *shuffled* every turn. This is poor design, you cant structure synergy here, as you are constantly threatened to draw the same cards over and over. This just feeds into the balance problem, of "just grab the most OP cards and scrap the rest"

3. Easy exploits: Again jmzero, nailed most of it. I will add shields (especially after unlocking a particular ship) are VERY exploitable. You can turtle up, create drones forever, and heal any dmg that gets by.

4. All events: now jmzero went over the crates. however, many ? events are lackluster. you find a trader...repair your ship...get fuel...sell fuel...etc. the only promising one is the temple ruins, but even that is just a choice of getting more credits at expense of fuel and hp, 5 times. Also to add to the crate, it doesn't help that the literal "do-nothing" iteration of that event can soft-lock the game!! (had it happen twice where the pop up doesn't go away ever, the event never ends, and i have to alt F4

4a. Slow-event handling: any pop-up, event, etc. is just slow to show up or finish.

even with these issues i can recommend this considering the alpha state. Potential buyers, i would say if you like FTL and slay the spire and want to support the devs, go for it, otherwise, wishlist it and wait.

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2792386215
For the Warp provided a mixed experience which has some surprisingly involved card-driven space combat. However, the hefty use of RNG gives it an unbalanced nature. One that is further complicated by a lack of mechanisms to limit its impact. Some gamers may find its content on the low side, but it has been made to be replayed. Very likely the reason for its steep difficulty curve.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2792380304
For the Warp is a well made, but unbalanced game. Strategic gameplay is good but could do with a few more additions and added variation. Tactical combat is at times an enjoyable experience with several viable strategies and synergies available. However, the substance deck-building possesses, is affected by a level of RNG that causes its overall difficulty to rise steeply, detrimentally impacting balance.

This results in a frustrating experience which is why its rating falls from being worthwhile to a MAYBE purchase, though only just.

Thank you for reading. | Follow my curator here.

I like the look, the theme and general direction this game is taking. Pixel art spaceships and roguelike.....take my credits! But For the Warp (FtW) makes you appreciate FTL, Slay the spire (StS) and many other roguelikes;

I am not enjoying the gameplay right now. It feels very RNG heavy and I'm constantly getting my butt kicked. The first ship is not very good with it's measly shield cap of 10hp and you will routinely run into groups of 3 enemies who hit for 9dmg each a round. Bosses hit for 10-20, and mid sized enemies can also do 10-20 damage. It's very hard to keep your shields up while also putting up an offense. The second ship is immediately better boasting 15shield cap and a ton of attack and draw cards. The game drastically gets more fun in the second ship, but the world is still wonky and not set up in an approachable way. I hope the other ships are cooler still but I don't feel inspired to play more and unlock them.

The grid you fly around on is frustrating. I find I"m getting bombarded with enemies, then bombarded with allied ships but there isn't any way for me to know ahead of time what I will run into. In FTL you could see the whole region and make a guess at which routes to avoid and which ones would be better. In FtW you only know one space ahead and backtracking costs precious fuel. You will run out resources.

In SlayTheSpire you could also plan ahead how many bosses/rests/merchants you'd roughly encounter. In FtW you can't plan at all. I"m often sitting outside the boss gate with 10%hp and not enough fuel to explore for help. Was I supposed to power through in a straight line? How many encounters should I risk for loot? It's incomprehensible.

I miss that in FTL the stations all offered the same services. You could always buy fuel, repair and purchase from a wide variety of weapons, drones and ship upgrades. SlayTheSpire had a similarly good merchant who offered card removal and card upgrades along with his RNG items. FtW could really benefit from stable merchants. The cost of fuel and repair is wildly different and making that last fuel jump to a station that doesn't sell fuel is very frustrating. I could see space games drop fuel as a mechanic if I"m honest.

The merchants in FtW would be better if they had actual selection. Three cards and one equipment is silly small. There are many deck styles you could build in this game. Either make the cards cheaper so that you can buy a large number and design your play deck and side deck, or give the players way more selection. In one instance I had a significant amount of money, and I bought more equipment than I could use, but there is nothing you can do with it afterwards. No merchant buys equipment from you and it's not relevant to any story based encounters. So if you don't plan on using the cards, you can't reliably get rid of them and they don't serve a story purpose....can I send the out the airlock?

Ultimately I want this game to be good but I don't like it right now. I am leaving a down vote so that the Devs see this feedback, but I also hope that other players will play the game in hopes that the devs get the resources they need to continue. I won't be refunding and will keep my fingers crossed that some of my concerns are addressed, or that other improvements are made.

This is a tentative recommendation.
Like many others have said, the game is fun but some things just don't work as you'd expect.
It's less a deck-builder and more a card pool-builder - you have discard & draw mechanics, but cards don't play in any sort of deck order. You can draw the same card in every hand, and never see others even over many turns.
The ability to explore sectors is cool, but it's not very useful and can encourage you to time-waste. Having played this I can understand why FTL has an enemy fleet chasing you. It's quite possible to become self-sufficient (gaining fuel with every battle & self-repairing) and clean out an entire sector, but there's little value to doing so - you'll have loads of money without anything useful to spend it on and just see the same two groups of enemies over and over.

Shields being capped is awful.
An (invisible!) limit to the number of cards played per turn is awful.
No unique cards or systems to different ships is awful.
Fuel management completely dictated by RNG is awful.
Fighting the same set of 3 enemies 10+ times in a row in over a single level is awful.

I beat the game with a 2 card infinite combo my first try.

Was this even play tested?

Like other reviews have said, the draw mechanic is nonsensical. You don't draw a card from the top, you draw it from a pool. So you can miss a card again and again and redraw cards immediately after playing them.

Finished the game on my second run using an infinite loop of gattling fire. Got nothing for it, Hardcore didn't even unlock. Game is really basic and lacks anything to set it apart from others. Art is pretty nice, the theme is good. Ran into several bugs.

Play Monster Train instead.

As others have pointed out, this game has a lot of great features and has some compelling gameplay. However, there are three things that kill it for me because they lead too far down the path of heavy RNG.

1) The shuffler makes no sense. The fact that you don't discard cards and that every time you draw a hand that you are pulling from your entire deck is against the foundation of what a deck builder game is supposed to be. It has all of the other facets of how to build and manipulate your deck but the player should be drawing from a shuffled stack and continue to do such until the discard pile needs to be shuffled back in. I might have been less opposed to this if you could freely discard cards from your deck without needing to pay for it or have NPC's want to buy them during events. But as it stands, it is far to easy to get a 18-20 card deck and that is far too much RNG when doing pool draws.

2) Draft mode is not worth playing due to the design of ships and certain cards. Each ship has a core deck archetype that goes with them. To top it off, you are shown 10 cards to pick from, then 9, then 8, etc. While this would certainly be what you would experience playing Magic: the Gathering, the cards do not have enough synergy to interface with each other in this format let alone to build a half way viable starter deck that matches the ship you selected. Also, you select the ship BEFORE you draft which should be the other way around. See what comes to you and what archetype you can build towards then decide what ship you want. The problem stated in #1 compounds this since you might not have that many shield cards and drawing them when you are getting blasted for 40 damage a round in the first map is not a good experience.

3) While playing in normal mode, there are certain cards you need to make your ship's archetype deck come together and there is no way to guarantee that you get those. As such, it leads to runs that are destined to fail because you, through RNG, just don't power up your deck to the point that you can handle later encounters. Especially when you get screwed by not drawing what you need from your pool (see #1) for several turns.


I like the premise of the game and it has a great foundation. Hopefully, these issues will get addressed by the developer in the near future as I look forward to playing this game after those patches land.

Honestly, I wanted to like this game. I really like slay the spire and this is basically based on this. But, the biggest issue as other reviews have stated, is the balance. You can be a full health doing great only to get cheesed out of the game but RNG. Now RNG is part of these types of games, but it really kicks you when you are down here. Like i have habitually taken 60+ damage on a turn and it makes it impossible to beat. There are also bugs and things that don't work correctly. For example you need to pick a card from your deck, if click anywhere on outside of the box, the game closes the screen and you can't go back. The game has also bought upgrades that where not there, spending my credits. It just sucks because I really want to like it, but I will play like 45 mins, be all buffed up in a run, everything looking good and then just get mega cheesed. The developer is not really updating the game either, so it doesn't look like these things will be fixed.

P.S. you start a a fight with only 3 card (vs. the standard 5 you draw ever turn after that) and then just get roasted because you can't shield up because you didn't draw the right cards. Why??? Why only 3 cards? What is the point of this? You are literally at your weakest at the start of fight and just by chance you encounter 3 enemies all attacking and boom, completely roasted. It feels really cheap, unbalanced, and un-fun. So many little things like this that seem to be chosen arbitrarily, but make the gameplay punishing.

Please balance the game.