They’re diving into space
They’re shuffling for the fight
To halt the alien race
They’re our Star*Vaders
They’re marching from the void above
Each wave reveals what we’re made of
Plotting moves and drawing cards
Our fate is written in the stars
OUR STAR*VADERS!
Anyone of a certain age will remember the English version of Space Battleship Yamato, “Starblazers”. The Earth is poisoned by an alien race, and if we can’t find a cure in a year, the Earth will be finished. Fortunately, we’re told by a space princess that there is a cure on her home planet, Iskandar, and if we can just go there and get it and return in a year, Earth will be saved! Problem: Earth has no starships. Answer: Dredge up the sunken WWII battleship Yamato, fill it with superscience, and fly it to Iskandar and back. The Comet Empire never saw THAT coming!
Maybe none of the Star*Vaders devs have seen the anime. They’ve definitely seen Space Invaders, though.
In Star*Vaders, the Earth is being invaded. All our air and space defenses are wiped out. All that’s left are brave mech pilots and their deadly machines, trying to stop the alien advance from bringing doom to us all.
The doom is literal; there’s a doom counter on the upper left, above the pilot portrait, that fills up when enemies get close.
Below the portrait is a heat counter. Anything you do generates heat. Overheat, and you lose a card for the rest of the level. Continuing counter clockwise, on the lower left is a timer. That’s how long you have to save Earth. They gave the Yamato crew a whole year; seems a little unfair. To the right of that is a time travel control — you can take back up to three moves.
Right of that is your current card hand with the actions you can take this turn. They are: Fire three bullets, at the diagonals and above; I can’t remember the second one; third one is set a bomb that will, when hit, explode, damaging stuff orthogonally adjacent; fire one bullet above; and move left or right one or two spaces.
Right of that is the end turn button; right of that are your discards. Continuing above is the help text for the selected card.
The missions you choose help you build your deck; successfully completing one usually gives you a choice of rare, powerful cards, or upgrades that let you tune your strategy or mitigate some of the negative effects of playing cards. Very similar to Slay the Spire.
That’s two of the three inspirations. How about the third parent in their little polycule, “Into the Breach”?
“Into the Breach” is a cute little indie strategy game where you are given a tactical puzzle to solve in a small number of moves. You have three pilots piloting three unique machines that must work together against overwhelming odds. Most of the levels are solved by setting cascading actions into play that lead to the inevitable destruction of the enemy; any false move means a restart.
Given you are controlling just one mech, and your available moves are randomly drawn, and that you can’t instantly retry a level until you succeed, there’s not a lot of Into the Breach in the game. But ItB still exists; go play it. Nonetheless, the enemy moves are not random. You’ll know just where they are going to go, and can set up traps and situations that they will blunder into. Most direct attacks can be avoided, but you’ll still be running against the timer and the doom counter in most levels.
The Steam demo takes you through the first two acts of the game with a single mech pilot. The game is goofy fun, and like Slay the Spire, the game is more about how far you get than actually winning. The boss battles at the end of each act have a good blend of “this is WAY too much” and “hold on, I have an idea” — the kind of thing where well-designed tactics puzzles shine.
I’ll definitely be picking up the full game when it’s released this year.
