StarVaders Is The Best Roguelike Since Hades

2025 has proven to be an extremely competitive year for games. I’ve never felt so much tension in my annual top ten list, and we’re not even halfway through the year. I’ve played multiple games this year that instantly became some of my all-tiജme favorites. There is no shortage of great games in 2ꦿ025, which is a blessing for gamers, but can be a curse for the people who make them

No matter how many great games come out, we only have so much time on this Earth to play them - an unfortunate fact ♉of life I’m actively looking for solutions to (DM me if you have any ideas). Existential♈ crisis aside, the reality of game development right now is that you can make a fantastic game that people will love, but if the stars don’t align, if your release date is too crowded, if the right streamers don’t grab hold of it, your game might not find the success it deserves.

A review card for Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo.

Pipistrello And The Cursed Yoyo🐼 Review - A ⭕Pippit To The Past

Pipistrello’s creative mechanics, chꦉarming world, and gorgeous Game Boy Advance stylings make it one of th❀e biggest surprises of the year.

Posts 168澳洲幸运5开奖网: ♔

I’ve highlighted a couple of 2025’s hidden gems recently, including 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sunderfolk, a brilliant couch co-op adventure that reimagines board game night, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-Yo, a Zelda-inspired throwback to the Game Boy era with some of the most inventive combat and platforming ever. Today, I want to talk about StarVaders, a turn-based roguelike that belongs in the conversation with all-time greats like Slay the Spire and Int🌼o Breach. Yes, it’s that good, even if you haven’t heard of it yet.

A Rare Roguelike Masterpiece

Let’s get the genre vomit out of the way. StarVaders is a turn-based 🍌tactical deckbuild🦩ing roguelike. I know that string of words sounds like Steam Chart poison to some people, but I promise you, this game will quickly sink its hooks in you if you give it a chance. Don’t let the cards or the turn-based strategy scare you, StarVaders is as easy to pick up as it is thrilling to play. We got the scary part over with, still with me?

In StarVaders, you play as a mech pilot defending Earth from an alien invasion. Levels are laid out on a grid, with enemies starting at the top and your mech at the bottom. You’ll spend energy to play cards, which allow you to move around the grid and blast aliens 💜with various weapons, and at the end of each turn, the aliens will move one space closer to you, like a turn-based version of Galaga.

Whenever an enemy reaches the bottom three rows of the grid, you’ll have one turn to eliminate them. If you don’t, you’ll gain one point of Doom, which is kinda🐓 like losing a health point, but backwards. Take five points of Doom and your run will end, resetting you back to the start.

You can think of it as Into the Breac💮h meets Slay the Spire, or roguelike Marvel’s Midnight Suns, or (my favori൲te comparison) a turn-based version of Mega Man: Battle Network. If you like any of those things (or all of them, if you have good taste), you’ll love StarVaders.

A Pace For Progression

One of my favorite things about StarVaders is that it isn’t afraid to let you make progress. The average run is about an hour, which is pretty typical 🍬for a roguelike deckbuilder, but you’re not just going to get to the last boss, die, and start over and over and over like a lot of roguelikes. StarVaders has a long onramp that makes learning the ins and outs more manageable and it doesn’t do the typical roguelike thing of making you feel like you suck right out of the gate. Instead, you’ll win the first few runs fairly easily and start to unlock some new things. By the time things start getting hard, you’ll have a good sense of where you made mistakes and how to adjust your strategy for success. It’s not the way rogueඣlikes usually operate, but it was undoubtedly the right decision for StarVaders.

It’s a tricky game that requires planning ahead, which isn’t always easy when your abilities are randomly drawn from a deck. Sta♐rVader keeps its deck relatively thin with opportunities to add and remove cards every few stages, so you can really tailor your deck for a specific strategy, which isn’t something you’l𝔍l always find in deck builders. Balatro did this exceptionally well last year, and StarVaders nails that balance too.

Choose Your Playstyle

Your first mech, Gunner, has a few different archetypes you can lean into, depending on the card you earn at the end of each fight. You’ll liಌkely start with a straightforward attack build, which lets you line up shots and take ou❀t aliens with attacks that chain to other aliens, taking out entire rows or groups of enemies at once. When things line up perfectly, the chain reaction that wipes the board can be incredibly satisfying.

My favorite strategy for Gunner revolves around strategically planting bombs and waiting for the right momeꦍnt to set them off. With the right cards, bombs turn into exploding turrets that can be used to take out enemies you can’t otherwise reach. Once you start firing shots from multiple positions on the grid simultaneously, the strategic depth of StarVaders really starts to shine.

The second mech you unlock is Stinger, and using it feels like playing a completely different game. Stinger has a giant sword and can teleport all over the grid to attack aliens face-to-face. It’s a high-risk, high-reward mech that requires even more careful planning than Gunner, but delivers even more satisfying turns of pure carnage. As you unlock new cards, new mechs, and new pilots, your options will open up and y♒our strategies will deepen, but it all unfolds at a pace that feels both manageable and exciting. It’s a game that’s constantly evolving from run to run, as all of the best roguelikes do.

Don’t Miss Your Chance To Play The Best Roguelike In Years

There are so many roguelikes out there, but there are really only a handful of legendary, genre-defining ones. Spelunky, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Hades, Into the Breach, and Dead Cells make up the Mount Rushmore of roguelikes that have stood the test of time and pushed the genre forwa𓃲rd. StarVaders has that potential too, if it can manage to find an audience.

It’s not an easy time for the little guy. When you’ve got games like Oblivion Remastered, , and Blue Prin𒊎ce all launching the same week, it’s easy for smaller games, even great ones like StarVaders, to fly under the radar. StarVaders came out at the end of April and, despite holding an 87 on Metacritic and an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, it has fewer than a thousand concurrent players right now. That’s a crime against good games, and I insist, no, I demand that you give it a chance. If you don’t like it, you can come back here and I’ll tell you another amazing game from 2025 that no one has heard of. I can’t guarantee you it ൲will be as good as StarVaders though, and in fact, I’m pretty sure it won’t be.