Void War

It's a good game, but it's a bit TOO much like FTL. Like, they stole the source code and put a basic reskin on it kind of too much like FTL. It's honestly no more than a stand-alone FTL mod. I wish the devs would do more to distinguish this game. Change the mechanics a bit, embrace more 40k style, be creative. Adding in some kind of co-op would be really neat as well.

Is this a fun game to play? Yes it definitely is and I can recommend it. This being said take note that: 1. The harder the difficulty the narrower the scope of viable strategies / ships / commanders becomes. Your ability to board and kill the enemy as early as possible in your campaign will be felt and failure to achieve such or similar will likely produce a frustrating and very RNG dependant run. 2. The final boss cheats (in the frame of the established mechanics) and your ability to defeat the guy will depend a lot on your ability to camp around and to destroy their shield (thus the importance of boarding). An alternative strategy is also to simply spam a million summons. 3. The game gives you no ability to design your own ships / crews, which is a shame. 4. There doesnt seem to exist any mods. 5. A run will take you 2-3 hours. 6. Narratively I am disappointed that I for example have to fight the empire (or any other faction for that matter), even if my ship / commander / crew are aligned with it and I did visit the imperial shrine.

An amazing spiritual successor to FTL. - Massively expanded crew system with a whole system of weapons - Satisfying crew combat - Psychomancy system which adds a whole other dimension of combat - Points system which encourages multiple playthroughs - Variety of commanders which will shape how you play in conjunction with the ship itself - Ground battles which encourage those with either the right crew sellection or overwhelming numbers - Demons and all while remaining legally distinct from any other IPs. Get it. It's a good time.

I purchased this game explicitly out of spite for a certain company which shall remain unreferenced in any direct fashion. I know who they are, you know who they are. ♥♥♥♥ 'em.

This is a great but also infuriating game at times. Sometimes, you'll think, "hmm, I want to play a rapid fire gun game", and the every shop you go to will have all the guns you want. But other games you'll think "hmm, since I unlocked this ship which buffs demonic summons, I'll run a game around that", only for every psychic shop to decide to sell only debuff and poison spells. And then of course, the first shop you run into next game, when running a different build, will have summoners and summon spells, despite it not even being a psychic shop.

Friendly crew, including the player commander, die instantly if aboard the enemy ship at the time of its destruction. That might seem "realistic", but in light of the always-available and free "Recall Crew" button that instantly teleports back all friendly crew from the enemy ship, this insta-death mechanic is actually just a glaring QoL hole. Why make players click a button in a scenario where they'd want to click it 100% of the time? Such anti-player "gotcha" design feels bad to play with, especially when it causes commander death and ends a long run. It doesn't help that ships can receive hull damage from a myriad of sources: fire, asteroids, the psychic missiles that you initiated 14 in-game seconds ago but you've since forgotten because it's been 5 busy minutes and there's no progress bar to help you keep track of when those are finally going to fire. These can quickly overwhelm the visual clarity of the user interface, which already struggles to communicate low enemy hull durability - those little violet sparks are easily lost in the visual noise. Worse yet, some environmental / boss effects actually white-out the entire screen briefly, including non-diegetic HUD elements. This leaves me between a laborious and an unfun place: must I be hypervigilant about boarding, or must I simply abandon that mechanic? Let crewmates auto-recall on ship destruction, or let zero-hull ships remain intact for a couple seconds for manual recall. The alternative is that If we can't get auto-recall, then at least zero-hull ships should remain intact for 2 seconds. I don't find this to be gamebreaking, but the cumulation of this and other pain points leads me to disagree that Void War should be rated 94% positive. I'd probably call it 75-80% positive, though. If that meets your bar, give the demo a try. [hr][/hr] Other pain points: Why are there no time speed options? Repeatedly double-tapping spacebar is a poor replacement for quarter or half-speed controls. Why can't I view important information on items (namely psychograms), summons, and abilities until they're irreversibly purchased / installed? Why are all event choices so irritatingly opaque? Sure, FTL's events weren't much clearer, but I'll give FTL some leeway on account of it having pioneered this genre. There are massive difficulty spikes from encountering enemy crews comprised of five to eight summoners who each can spawn two to five mobs directly onto your ship - it seems the game considers such a crew equivalent to a small number of strong units, but a 50-ghoul bumrush inundating your ship is infinitely more threatening and less counterable than three Death Knights sitting on their own ship, not to mention that the summoner crew also benefits from more hands to repair away your own damage and effects. [hr][/hr] Side note, isn't it curious that everyone's hyper-aware of possible legal action from Games Workshop, but basically nobody is considering similar action from Subset Games, who owns - functionally speaking - the far more impactful source content? What makes grimdark worldbuilding more intellectually protectable than the entire core design of a game, including UX, art style, and all fundamental gameplay mechanics?

it's like a more expansive FTL with equipment/abilities for the crewmembers and a Warhammer 40K-esque world

its like 40k and FTL had a love child. Its very good and has surprising depth to its game play.