Exploring derelicts is a must in a dystopian future.
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While some games nail down every variable so thoroughly that they feel more like interactive slideshows than artificial playgrounds, many games, sometimes entire genres, are built up around the notion that the computer can create some degree of novelty every time, through randomness, reactivity, and hidden information. Deep Sky Derelicts is a subset of these genres, a dungeon crawl in space that provides random loot, a card battle system, and random derelict layouts with several substantially different classes for your explorer team, all alongside structured missions. As with any system with enough variables, Deep Sky Derelict’s experience comes down not to a list of features but how the whole system actually functions over time, which we’ll go into below.
After creating a team of three characters from a list of classes and getting a debriefing from the head of a space station, players are thrown into the game with a few smaller, easier derelicts to explore, looking for the navigation computers that will point toward more derelicts and the game’s end. Early on, hazards are limited to the monsters you find there, a mix of machines, zombies, aliens, and fellow derelict raiders. There are also incidental quests you can pick up by talking to people you meet or a sometimes updated mission board on the space station. As you explore rooms in a derelict, done through the game’s map screen, your energy reserves run down. When they reach zero you start to lose health. If your team is wiped out in combat or from lack of energy, unless you’re in hardcore mode you will get to reload, either from manual saves between battles or the autosave you get whenever you enter a derelict. You may also reliably refill some energy using up spare tanks, a few encounters, or sacrificing items.
The turn-based battles are frequent enough that it’s good they can often be satisfying, and a good portion of the character skills and abilities directly influence combat. Character abilities are based on class, and, to a greater extent, equipment. Each piece of equipment and up to two mods for it may add ability cards which are drawn into a hand for each character at the start of battle and increase by one card per turn. Deck management strategies found in other card-based games are useful here, such as not having too large a deck that you won’t conveniently be able to get the cards you prefer, and some have search abilities that can be used to reduce randomness. Enemies also use cards, invisible until you see them used, so they won’t always be able to do optimal attacks, lending a great deal of uncertainty and tension to a battle. Certain classes lean more heavily on melee abilities, while others more on ranged or psychic attacks, and in addition to cards equipment can also enhance attacks in many interesting ways, giving you a chance to instantly kill minor enemies, get extra hits, cause status effects, area effects, reduce target shields, and have a chance to prevent discarding a card once it’s used, among others.
While the start can be rough for those unfamiliar with the game, the difficulty ramps up substantially the deeper you go. A new derelict may mean that enemies have a lot more hit points and shields to slice through. Damage reduction, armour, evasion, stun effects, and shield regeneration (as well as bad card draws) might lead to round after round of stalemate, especially if you’re behind in equipment and levels, and we had a few battles where an enemy was regenerating shields faster than we could cut through them, so we had to wait until it played the wrong card to finally kill it. Early on, the player’s ability to survive is curtailed by a lack of income from salvage and missions, low energy reserves, and poor equipment. Allow for judicious retreats if you can’t handle a battle, and perhaps a restart or two before you get a handle on the game’s economy and skill system, especially if you can’t afford to revive downed crewmembers in the medical centre (replacement crew can be hired, but it costs more to hire somebody than it does to heal the person you have, strangely enough). The game’s energy economy also has to be managed through upgrades, as does the efficiency and effectiveness of scanning, which reveals the map and creatures within, an indispensable tool in the later stages when there are hazard zones that affect battle rules and monsters you might want to avoid.
The difficulty curve starts out a bit tough with all this early-game uncertainty, but as you get a handle on things it becomes more about figuring out how best to beat enemies with much higher hit points and damage resistance, making character builds perhaps more specialised than is possible for you unless you’ve retained a lot of the nicer weapons and tools that have abilities that might help. A big problem in the game then winds up being inventory management. If you sell most or all of the equipment you find that isn’t worth upgrading to, you may have to dip into your cash reserves, if you have any, to buy mods that might help with a creature ability you hadn’t anticipated. If you have a lot of contingency equipment your inventory will fill up quickly and become increasingly hard to navigate, even using the sort function. Equipment comparisons have to be done one click at a time, and while some screens give you a lot of information on abilities, others give you little, requiring multiple clicks and mouseovers to get information that should be available at a glance. We found we dreaded going back to the space station, as it meant often spending more time than moving through the derelict just sifting through items.
After completing several derelicts and taking the occasional offbeat side-missions that add much-needed variety to ship exploration, you will likely get on top of things. Toward the end of the game, energy management becomes largely trivial, and some abilities are clearly much better than others at reducing attrition or breaking through more common enemy abilities. Money is less tight since later derelicts tend to have plenty of salvage. Character builds will still have their pitfalls, as a few powers are unclear until you’ve already spent the points to get them, and an entire skill tree branch unlocks to allow for a chance to put points into abilities that may turn out not to be as useful once you reach the top of the list. You will find your favourite builds and when they work properly you will likely still enjoy combat as much as you did early on, though the enemy hit point and shield levels may seem a bit insurmountably inflated at times, or enemy abilities require a change in tactics you may not be able to easily counter. The actual exploration of the derelicts will probably have lost its charm by then, as so much of it comes down to avoiding or picking fights, using hazard zones strategically, ploughing through obstacles and traps, sorting the loot you get or destroying pieces for spare energy, and planning efficient routes should the randomness of a derelict afford you a choice. There are times in the late game where battle difficulty feels nicely balanced, where you have to escape to the station as your crew’s health dwindles dangerously low, but there are others where combat is merely a loot-and-time liability, and still others when you’re being smacked around by forces you can’t quite handle.
It must be said that the art in this game is gorgeous. You can pause in any room on a derelict and see how massive and strange these places are, much more compelling than the monotone map of squares that is a good portion of the game. The character art is detailed, varied, and at times uncanny, with multiple reactions for different combat conditions and little comic-book style insets when damage is dealt. The music is often brooding synth straight out of an ’80s thriller and a perfect complement to the game’s general feel. When you get a good combination of abilities going it can be thrilling, and the skill system is complicated enough that levelling will always present interesting choices, though there is level cap of 10. It is always nice to find a new card ability or especially effective weapon or tool, though this is usually tempered by whether one needs to wrestle with the equipment interface too much. The combat interface forces you to choose between selecting portraits of enemies despite them sometimes looking identical with no instant way to know which is which without mousing over them, and clicking on the enemies themselves, which sometimes dance around or partly obscure their teammates such that you may accidentally click on the wrong creature and waste an attack. Similarly, when your hand of cards gets rather large, you’re sometimes also in danger of selecting an unintended card.
Some will have noticed that Deep Sky Derelicts bears a resemblance to Darkest Dungeon, but the games feel very different. The striking art and turn-based battles alone show quite a bit of variance between the two games. Those frustrated with Darkest Dungeon’s tendency to rely on the repetition of a few abilities, stinginess with item capacity, and fragility of their crew may find something to like here, but anyone searching for the same stunning thematic depth, shocking moments, and relentless, oppressive difficulty will likely be disappointed.
Deep Sky Derelicts often feels like the derelicts you explore in-game: large swathes of emptiness and obstacles that can try your patience, with thrilling moments and some interesting choices to soothe the nerves. Much of the replay value is wrapped up in how the classes, skills, and equipment interact, as the dungeon-delving itself is reducible to largely uninvolved clicking between points of interest as you scan the map. The combat can sometimes be a slog, especially if you’re underpowered or lacking the proper remedies to enemy abilities, and there are precipices on the difficulty curve, especially early on, that may lead to a restart, or selling everything to pay medical bills. The appeal of this is up to individual tastes. Had the mid-to-late game been slightly denser, had the difficulty spikes not been so severe at times, had the inventory management felt more consistent and convenient to reduce time spent doing it, had navigating the derelicts felt a bit more momentous somehow, had the space station felt a bit less staid and cursory, it might be easier to recommend the game unreservedly. There are a lot of worthwhile elements in Deep Sky Derelicts; what you get out of them will depend on what things you prefer doing, and what you’re willing to wade through to get to them.
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Keyword: Deep Sky Derelicts