StarVaders Review
StarVaders, by StarVaders Studio/Pengonauts and published by Playworks and Joystick Ventures, is an upcoming roguelike deckbuilder with a unique twist-it seamlessly blends the thrill of deckbuilding with grid tactics. This innovative approach, coupled with its launch on Steam on April 30th 2025, is set to challenge players to save the world from an alien invasion in a gameplay that is both retro-familiar and thrillingly different.
StarVaders combines three concepts: roguelike deck-building, grid strategy, and frantic old-school Space Invaders. You play as customizable mechs with distinct sub-classes and one special mechanic while you hold off hordes of aliens descending from the summit of the vertical grid. Your last line of defense is the last three rows—if enemies reach those, they establish a "Doom," and draining the Doom meter concludes your run.
Instead of traditional health, StarVaders has an innovative 'Doom' system. The system forces you to be careful with risk management and battlefield management. When you get hurt, you receive 'junk' cards to add to your deck to complete your hand and even to empower enemies, giving it an added resource management beyond HP loss. Each play-through involves careful movement, card play, and adapting to emergent enemy classes and threats. Enemies who reach the bottom three lines form 'Doom,' and completing the Doom meter completes your play-through, which is an essential part of the game.
The building of the decks is solid, with plenty of varied cards, relics, and pilot abilities to unlock to offer limitless combinations of synergies and combos. Each mech, from the Gunner to the Stinger, is played differently, and each pilot of each mech contributes to different playstyles and strategies. This depth of strategy, combined with the game's strong replayability, encourages you to try things out and make up your own strategy. Each loss unlocks pilots and cards, and without a suffocating system of branching choices, each choice—what to level up, what reward to choose—is significant. The free demo offers three acts, dozens of bosses and enemies, and three pilots, with additional content at launch.
The graphical style of StarVaders, including its offbeat enemy models and hand-drawn characters, is appealing and distinctive. Its chip-tune music is energetic without verging on obnoxious. The game is filled with quality-of-life touches, such as legible card previews to help with strategy planning and the skipping of duplicate rewards, so beginners are accommodated, and veterans are rewarded. These touches collectively contribute to the game's playability as a whole and indicate the developers' care to ensure player fun.
Refined as it is, there are nevertheless some rough edges. Specific mechanics, such as handling area-of-effect attacks, are finicky. The game's randomness means that poor draws or destructive enemy waves can terminate a run in short order, although the rewind system reduces frustration.
StarVaders is proving to be a go-to for roguelike and deckbuild enthusiasts. Its addictive gameplay, and community-driven development make it one to watch as it prepares to launch April 30th. Its colorful presentation, depth of strategy, and infinitely replayable matches put StarVaders at an 8/10—a game to play for fans of the genre who are up for a challenge.
