Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Price: Currently free on GOG.com
Blurb: ‘Deep Sky Derelicts is an original combination of turn-based strategy and RPG, enriched with tactical card combat and popular roguelike elements. Explore derelict alien ships, fight, loot, and upgrade your gear, all in distinctive retro-futuristic comic book aesthetic style.’
I’ll be honest, I passed this game over, many, many times. Deck building games is not my bag, baby. Since it was free on GOG, I thought, why not? I don’t visit GOG a lot, I find the interface too clunky. There is some DLC here, some DLC there, this version with some DLC included, this version without, just confusing. I prefer having DRM-free games, do not doubt that fact!
The reason I avoid deck builders is because I never feel in control (maybe I’m a control freak?). It’s a bunch of random cards that come into your hand every turn. Luck of the draw, sort of thing. Thus, I was unsure about starting the game, despite liking the sound of the premise.
I installed the game and was still perusing the comic-book graphics, when the music dropped. After Dredge, this is my favourite calming music soundtrack!!
Let’s get to the meat and potatoes; you are a scavenger, you are tasked to find information on a “mothership” by collecting information on derelicts orbiting a black hole. You surround yourself with punching bags, erm, mercenary scum, erm, team mates, to help you in your mission. You start in a scavenger base, where you can heal up, charge up, skill up, sell stuff, hire mercs, etc, and head out on missions to the surrounding derelicts.
Each derelict is a fog of war covered squares. You explore, limited by your store of power. Movement costs power, combat costs power, scanning for more tiles costs power, I think you get the picture. You must make sure you've always enough power left to return to a ship's launch bay(s) – sometimes you can get lucky and find more. Once you are out of power you can only retreat, and that costs life points!
You have space for three people in your party. Even though you (Kobayashi) do not have to be in the squad. Now this may all seem very rogue-like to you, but it has card combat with JRPG-type stand-off battles.
Like most card-based battlers, you have attack cards, buff cards, or defence cards. I don’t like the RNG here; too many times I end up with no attack or defence cards, only buff cards, which I do not want to play as there seems to be a bug where, when I play a buff, I usually get crited. (The other part scores a critical hit on my character, doing double damage in the next round).
More and different cards are “bought”. You buy a gun, and you get say, a card, or cards, that do less damage, but let you shoot more times, that now gets added to your deck. Other than this horrible RNG where you can get no fighting cards for two rounds, the game is solid. It runs like a dream on Ubuntu, even on my potato laptop, I see no difference from my top-end laptop.
This may be because the game is not demanding, the battles are comic book panes. Though I took a quest to capture janitor robots, I could not find a way to subdue them, only bap them into scrap, which was satisfying in itself.
What I appreciated from this game is that my rogue does not start off naked and afraid. This is my biggest complaint with games like Shattered pixel dungeon – you start with a retard in rags with one sarmie in hand, entering a dungeon hoping to fist enough rats to death to find coins, just to starve on the second floor. You start off charged, and armed, and with money in the bank.
Since you are scavenging, your salvage can be sold, but I seemed to make more dough from taking and completing quests. I would have liked to have the quest-giver’s inventory of quests refresh when you hand in a completed quest, but I suppose they are but side-quests. I am contemplating buying the DLC as they are like 1-2 USD each, to see how it fills out the game, as there is a lot of potential here.
What felt a bit lazy, was the enemies. You will find these hostile lizards that will attack immediately, but they will team up with a bounty hunter, for instance. Why? It sort-of breaks the immersion of an otherwise OK game. You know, I want to stumble in on a fight with 2 groups and *maybe they team up and fight me, maybe they run away, not just lump level one monsters together because they are level one. Also the victory dance after every battle is a fist-pump comic panel. Maybe have a few “death scenes” where the villain does the - I’ll be back narrative, whilst skulking around a corner? I’m not saying I need fatalities and babalities here, but some variety.
Because it is free and fun, it gets a pass. My suggestion is to go get it now, while it is free. *And even if you miss the giveaway, I think the deluxe edition is $2.99 USD. For a game that works flawlessly on Ubuntu, it is worth the money spent. (I saw the game for $15.99 USD, in that case, no).