StarVaders Review: Mechs, Decks, and Tactics Collide to Save Humanity!

The first thing I’d like to tell you about StarVaders is not to dismiss it just for being yet another deckbuilder, or for having a name that sounds like a bad Star Wars fanfiction about a group of identical quadruplet Darth Vaders that rise to stardom as a galaxy-touring boy band, not that I’ve given it any thought.

I play a lot of deckbuilders and spend significant time wishing I could find one that comes anywhere near my treasured, beloved Slay the Spire. None do, and only Balatro, Inscryption, and Dicey Dungeons come especially close, in my opinion. But StarVaders has ideas that not only make it stand out but may place it as a top-tier deckbuilder in its own right. Or will they?! I guess you’ll have to keep watching to find out! Please keep watching. Please, I need this job, they’ll take my organs.

StarVaders starts out wisely enough by giving you a choice of how thickly you want to be tutorialized, with the option of a full tutorial recommended for new players versus a quick guide that shows you the basics and lets you explore from there. I highly recommend the full tutorial if you don’t play a lot of deckbuilders, but if you do, a quick overview might be all you need. As is common in deckbuilders, each roguelite run will take you through three separate acts that get progressively much harder and progressively more synergize-y (assuming things work out), with each act consisting of three major battles, an item shop visit, and a boss fight.

What’s interesting about StarVaders, though, and perhaps the first thing that struck me as unusual, is that nobody has a health bar. You don’t, and none of the enemies that populate the compact rectangular grid it calls a battlefield do, either. Because in a sense, this deckbuilder takes some cues from tower defense titles. Each battle will start with enemies spawning all over the top half of the board, and each turn gradually making their way down it like little angry Tetris pieces, while occasionally pummeling you with a well-choreographed missile or bullet.

Your job is to take them out – one hit for most enemies, two hits for shielded ones – before they make landing in the bottom three rows, where they begin to generate Doom. Earn enough Doom, 5 units of it by default, and your run is over, at which point you get to start back at the beginning in traditional roguelike fashion, while unlocking some additional tools for your next run in traditional rogueLITE fashion. Taking enemies out is a matter of using a randomly drawn hand of cards from your deck, which will have an energy—err—heat cost much like those… other deckbuilders, you know the ones, I don’t need to name them again.

But intriguingly enough, StarVaders gives you some additional tools. For one, playing enough cards to fill up your entire heat gauge isn’t the end of your turn, nor is a card unplayable just because it has a higher heat cost than you’re able to pay. Cards that are out of your thermal budget are still very much playable, but show as on fire in your hand as a warning that you’re about to overheat. Overheating a card will allow you to play it as you usually would, but proceeds to burn it such that it becomes completely unplayable for the rest of the battle, leaving you to draw a dud every subsequent time it enters your hand. Naturally, though, as you progress through each run, you may unlock cards or artifacts that make having burnt cards surprisingly beneficial, progressing StarVaders’ consistently tricky tightrope walk of risk vs. reward, like any great deckbuilder should. There are also Chrono tokens, which can come very much in handy when you find yourself in a bind. Use of a Chrono token will allow you to rewind to the beginning of your turn before you did that dumbass shit you did, reroll the reward offerings after a battle, or replenish items in the shop. And while these are extremely limited in number, careful use of them can definitely give you an edge against the game’s roguelike random generation.

It feels somewhat necessary too, because while randomness in StarVaders doesn’t quite screw you over, the limited number of battles in each run corresponds to a similarly limited number of earnable rewards, making each decision one that pretty much has to ultimately be of use.  Because while I find StarVaders to be a really intriguingly designed game with some well-implemented ideas I haven’t seen before, it’s also pretty damn hard, even by the relatively high bar set by the average deckbuilder.  Which is not something I have qualms with in general, but the fact that you have to beat a run on the base difficulty level AND the next highest difficulty level before even unlocking a new class kind of rubbed me the wrong way.  When I’m playing a deckbuilder, I want other classes to unlock faster than other difficulties do so I can choose who I feel like playing as and what kind of run I want.  And while there are three types of mech classes and ten different pilots to ultimately choose from in StarVaders, you better learn to get good at the Gunner Mech class or you’re going to be playing as it for a looong time.  At least each unlockable Gunner pilot has different starter decks and unlockable cards and skills, but even so, the game’s stubborn refusal to quickly open up feels a bit petty.

While runs aren’t terribly long at about an hour or so depending on how well you do, how into the core gameplay you are may depend on where you stand on tactical RPGs.  I found StarVaders’ basic gameplay loop to be compelling and fun, but the extra element of having to position your mech strategically in a grid adds a level of complexity that prevents the sort of smooth, buttery flow of a typical deckbuilder.  Indeed, StarVaders’ Chrono tokens are such a godsend mainly because strategies tend to get complex enough to need playing out before being certain that they work.  Recklessness will certainly shorten your run, but not in the way you’re likely to want it to.  So the ability to rewind a limited number of times can help make you less afraid to experiment, if still demanding a significant amount of attention and skill.

As one would hope and expect from a roguelite deckbuilder with 2D visuals, StarVaders runs great on the Steam Deck, and is a great fit for a handheld form factor.  What’s especially nice is that while you could always suspend a run using Steam Deck’s suspend and resume feature, you can even save and quit a run mid-battle, with progress made in that battle still being preserved down to the turn you were on.  I love that for a deckbuilder and wish some others would follow suit, even if replaying a battle from the beginning is hardly the end of the world.

Visually, StarVaders is bright and colorful with a Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic, but never struck me as particularly interesting to look at.  Hell, Slay the Spire isn’t either so clearly I don’t care about that much in a deckbuilder.  Maybe its art style will be somebody’s cup of tea, but to me all of the enemy and pilot designs were pretty basic and never grabbed my attention in any meaningful way.  The soundtrack is pretty solid though, with a couple of memorable tunes that channeled all the right vibes.

StarVaders does try to have sort of a plot but I suspect that like myself, you’ll probably wonder what the point is before long.  It’s very much window dressing and not something that’s going to occupy any of your attention for longer than it takes to hit the skip button.  But the attempt to add some context to the bombastic alien mech fighting is admirable, I suppose, even if not exactly necessary.

Ultimately, I feel that StarVaders is a deckbuilder with a lot of good ideas that make it its own beast, rather than a carbon copy of the genre titans that clearly inspired it.  I wish more varied classes would unlock a little faster given the game’s unforgiving nature, but it’s hard to fault it much when it so confidently rolls out new ideas – something the genre can occasionally struggle with.  I didn’t love it enough to put it in the top echelon of deckbuilders for me, but if Slay the Spire is an S-tier title and the others I mentioned are comfortably A-tier, StarVaders gets a commendable B+.  It’s a really fun time with plenty of content, and any fans of deckbuilders looking for a unique challenge would be served well to pay attention.

GREAT