Psycho Starship Rampage

Viciante

Psycho Starship Rampage scratched an itch that I didn't know that I had. It's been a lot of fun in the short time I've played it. The downside to the game is that play sessions can last a lot longer than you anticipated as you go "just one more round" round after round. The basic premise of an FTL-style map and progression combined with shoot-em-up gameplay is engaging enough, and the learning curve is just enough that you feel satisfied when you get over it. I finished the campaign on my second try. The basic strat of "get lots of scrap and don't die" works pretty well, and then you're down to your rolls on gear. The ending felt pretty satisfying even if the end boss was anticlimactic by that point. Despite all the fun, there were parts of the game that were annoying: Space terrain (floating rocks) is heavily RNG: sometimes your screen will be full of enormous boulders with no way around. The space rocks aren't very obvious as well, and fail to stand out when the screen is full of bullets going every-which-way. Enemies rubber-band hard when knocked off their path, and will happily careen through rocks and the player ship to get where they're going. Even bosses: if your boss fight is full of space rocks, they're a much larger threat than the boss itself due to how much the bosses send them flying around. I've also had a few times where I've gotten boxed into a corner by a boss who would proceed to bonk against me until it exploded because my hull had more HP; not a very satisfying way to win a boss fight. Edit 07/18/2023: Survival mode, on the other hand, seems kinda rubbish. It ought to be fun, but the above-mentioned gameplay issues along with no repairs outside the repair drops mean you get to play a game of "sell damaged stuff and buy the exact same stuff new." This is the opposite of fun gameplay. "You unlock stuff when you die!" Punishing players for surviving (in a survival mode) is also not fun gameplay. The alleged "leaderboard" that attempted to load after I died still had not loaded after ten minutes of waiting, and even if it did would the score compare the death 0 run to everyone else's heavily-rng-dependent death-0 run, or to every run? To improve this mode, unlocks should activate upon achievement, not death. If you want to include a no-unlocks challenge, then make that a toggle and a separate leaderboard. Include "Repair all" to remove the annoying "sell and re-buy everything" gameplay. Suddenly you have a fun, relatively-balanced, and rewarding survival mode. In Summary, Psycho Starship Rampage is a lot of fun. Don't expect AAA-quality, just blast stuff, collect scrap, buy upgrades and that's all you need. Play the campaign until you win, or play survival while you're bad so you can collect deaths, otherwise you'll be punished by un-fun gameplay. I did enjoy it and felt the money well-spent, but after that survival I'm done.

So much unrealized potential. Don't bother unless it's ultra cheap.

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When you get 100% achievements [b] The voices are silent at last! [/b]

This is a great little game. But it is unstable and crashes on both Ubuntu Linux and Windows 10. Xbox One controller support is also a little buggy.

needs a sequal so bad!