Stellar Raiders

I enjoyed my first run of Stellar Raiders. It's interesting and evocative in a way that I wasn't expecting. There have been a lot of games that have tried to use the small-scale very-discrete flavor of tactics games that Into the Breach was the big pioneer of since that game came out, and this is the first that I feel has done something truly interesting and original with the concept. I don't feel the comparisons to chess I see in other reviews are accurate or helpful. The game doesn't really play like chess, other than the starting unit moving in an L-shape like the knight. The game has a very puzzle-like feel, and I recall having been tickled when, during an early mission, I realized that the particular configuration of moves I had available was going to make some actions easy and others impossible. I think the game's biggest weakness is the visuals. While for the most part they're clean and clear, they're unexciting and the units are all too visually similar, which it made it very hard for me to remember which of my units was which once I had 3 or 4 of them. I found the first run very easy. I hope the difficulty scales quickly because if I have to play 5-10 easy runs to get to something challenging, I fear I'm going to tire of the game before it gets really interesting.

It feels like a roguelike puzzle game but it's very tight in the design with ton of possibilities and choices