What's the goal of these challenges?

[Abomination72]

Just survive X minutse or something?
I've run challenge one and two for a while. Now the third one won't unlock because I need to 'clear' stage one. So.. that's challenge one, right? And how do you clear that? 10 minutes is not enough obviously. So what is?

[SP00KYGUNNER]

After 15 minutes a boss spawns, you have to kill that to beat the challenge.

[Abomination72]

15 minutes with that deck?? owkee.. yeah, that's a challenge for sure.
I also noted global upgrades don't carry over to these challenges.

Edit: huh? Now some do carry over but others don't? ok.. this game is a mess.. so confusing what's going on all the time.

Edit2: Got to the boss. Gas overlord. Couldn't kill it. Missiles don't seem to do any damage. This game is seriously ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.
Uninstalling.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

You may not have noticed that you can build your own deck and select it. A specialized deck, like one with all beams or all drones, can and will blast through these "challenges" if you add just enough cards to make the deck useful, but not so many that you never get the cards you need.

I beat all five challenge levels with a deck that was based on just using fighter drones. I just lazily moved around and by the time the boss decided to show up in each stage, my 15+ drones were murdering everything that got too close (too close being half a screen of distance.)

So yeah, this game has issues with some bugged weapons (which are getting patched, just looking at release notes would tell you this,) but that's just a consequence of the gaming disease known as "Early Access." All things considered, this game's far from bad for an early access title.

[DemonicSquid]

If you've not customised your deck and/or unlocked more cards by completing the campaign a few times then you will struggle doing the challenges.

To customise your deck, choose one or two weapons only and their upgrades plus as many of the equipment upgrades as you can. you don't want to be stuck with too many cards in your deck so you don't get in a situation where you are only getting non-weapon cards early on.

The gas dude is the hardest boss IMHO, but luckily which one you get is random based on the map type.

[Abomination72]

I didn't even know you could change that deck.

It says it uses a prebuild deck or something. Also, two days ago, I perma-upgraded a few cards, but during the next challenge run they were not upgraded. I added a few cards to the standard deck, did a run, but these never showed up. I even deleted the default deck, which did not change the challenge one single bit. Still the same cards as usual. So by that time, I assumed it used some fixed internal build you couldn't modify at all.

Oh well, maybe I'll give it another go sometime soon-ish. Also think this can become a very cool game, so I keep my eyes on the updates page.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

The cards you "upgrade" when building your deck aren't permanent, but applied to one single card you add to your deck. It's an emergency "I don't want to play a whole campaign for a single upgrade" deal.

To be honest, only having one card upgrade as a reward for the hour and then some that a campaign may take is a bit too much into the "low reward" realm for me too.

This game can become a very good game or sink, depending on how things are handled. Right now it's way too grindy, but not challenging enough (did the five challenges in one go after just five campaign runs,) and no, "difficulty" levels just make things more bullet spongy, they're still the same brain-dead "see player, try to touch player" AI that's easy to kite and dodge until they reach "wall of enemies" levels of density.

[Abomination72]

Now I tried a beam build. Still couldn't give the boss one single scratch. Already reinstalled the game. Nothing works.

I've defeated campaign mode multiple times without much issue. Challenges are broken on my machine.

[Maxen]

The game needs clearer objectives for the challenges. I had no idea I had to go 15 minutes to spawn a boss to clear stage one.

[Graytail]

I've cleared point tranquil (1), but in Refinery Alpha {2), no boss ever spawned or anything... I was in there for perhaps half an hour before I wandered off and let my ship fend for itself for the next hour before *something* finally got it. Did I just get unlucky every time I've played this? Because, 15 minutes is a damned short run for me but nothing happens.
"CLEAR STAGE ONE" is ever so helpful in actually clearing it