Deep Sky Derelicts

Deep Sky Derelicts is one of those turn-based card strategy games (I don't like the term "roguelike", but since its grid-based exploration map is similar to the labyrinth of the original Rogue, I guess the comparison is valid this time) that are seemingly generic, offering some short-term casual fun, except for this particular one is surprisingly enjoyable with mild RPG elements, a deep development system with plenty of equipment, different character classes... and cards of course, lots of them.
As a stateless (low-class person) scavenger with experience, we are given the opportunity to locate the legendary Mothership and uncover the marvellous technology it hides. In return we'd receive citizenship and a place to live in the Mirror World (which is the opposite of the space station we dwell on in the cold, dark and wreckage-filled space). Without additional help however, we must travel blindly into space and look for clues on abandoned derelicts.
First we must create our 3 characters (they can be revived on the base + we may hire new ones - although just reloading the game is easier) choosing from 6 classes and selecting a trait. While these traits may sound as if they had negative effects as well, they all provide positive bonuses - neurotic for example is especially useful because with that +2 initiative we can act before our enemies could.
Character classes not only define our starting equipment and points in the 5 main attributes (weaponry, tech, medical, scavenging, mental), they also determine which skills we can acquire as we gain levels. Upon reaching level 4 we can specialize our characters - for example train our medic into a surgeon or the technician into 'master of robots'.
New levels give us ability points, extra abilities and a set of cards, which play a primary role in combat. These cards are only available to the specific characters - for example our medic has access to all kinds of cards related to healing and strengthening our crew members. Each card has a governing attribute - if we concentrate on that attribute with the given character, the specific card will be more effective.
To summarize it all, we need to aim to increase our primary attribute and specialize to bring the maximum out of our cards in combat. Surprisingly, party diversity is not a necessity - on the contrary: 3 bruisers or 3 technicians work best (but obviously we should avoid stupidities like having 3 medics, they are great in the early-/mid-game, but feel lame later on, even if shields regenerate after combat and health doesn't). A bruiser is mandatory (even if their melee only approach may sound restricting) in every party, they have crazy amounts of hit points (I took a scavenger instead and had a hard time surviving). Technicians are also super handy, since they can refill personal shields (enemies need too nullify this first before damaging health, although some attacks go through shields) + they have access to powerful drones later on, which are great for diversion.
Once our team is ready, we can explore the space station, the hub of our operations. The layout is easily recognizable and so are the functions of the 5 areas we can visit:
Lair - taking on contracts/hiring new mercenaries
Pawnshop - buying/selling, refilling energy required to explore
Deep Sky Medical - healing/curing
Research workshop - upgrading equipment, extending energy reserves, reducing movement energy cost, increasing scan range (these are vital things and we should save money to buy these as soon as we can)
Station Hall - residence of the Sub-Governor, only required for the main storyline
After we accepted some contracts, we may select the systems we need to travel to. This, like everything else costs money. We shouldn't worry much about level recommendations, the initial enemies will be hard either way, until our team gets properly equipped.
The most important thing we are going to need is energy - if it runs out, we take damage continuously. We should always refill it whenever we arrive to or leave the station. Every action we perform costs energy (even combat turns), but it's not as terrible as it sounds, there are ways we can get supplies during missions - from computers or by salvaging items.
Upon setting foot on a derelict, we see a rather basic graph paper looking 2D map. Where we start is the landing zone and we have to return here in order to travel back to the space station (there's also another one usually at the other side of the wreckage). Moving around costs 10 energy and initially we can only see the adjacent tiles (this is why we need to upgrade all map- and energy related feats in the research shop - not only we can spare a lot of credits, but we can also explore more safely): on the map we may encounter NPCs, find hidden loot, supercomputers and of course enemies (shown by red triangles). Enemies will try and follow us, so once we get close to them, combat is pretty much unavoidable.
The game deploys a wide variety of enemies: from space lizards to zombies and of course all kinds of robots are present along with other hostile scavengers (these are not NPCs, so we can't talk to them).
On each derelict, besides finding better equipment and earning money of course, our primary task is to find mainframes which may contain information about the location of the Mothership. We may also encounter NPCs who can give us new tasks, like saving someone from bounty hunters. While we do have a choice in these situations, I would have enjoyed a bit more of them.
The card- & turn-based combat is the main selling point of the game and the part that makes playing it so enjoyable.
When we enter combat, our active character's available cards are shuffled and listed randomly, from here we can pick one to attack the enemy or boost ourselves. If the offered cards aren't ideal, new ones can be drawn, but it (also) costs energy.
The sheer number of factors which influence our actions is amazing. There's literally EVERYTHING here - from the well-known block, counter, evasion, fear, taunt to ones such as energize which gives our character an extra action or focus, upon which consecutive attacks against the same target increase the damage. There are also special tiles with certain conditions, like magnetic interference where our scanning is disabled and a 33% miss chance for ranged attacks.
The equpment we carry also has a huge impact on the outcome, there are insanely powerful "illustrious" ones with higher than normal values and an extra ability and we can modify every piece with 2 special upgrades further increasing their potential.
There's a very useful 'codex' in-game where every effect is explained, so we don't have to guess what we are suffering from and how we got it.
While I know that the comic book style graphics are generally popular, I find it a somewhat lazy solution instead of real animations, but otherwise it's OK. The brown/washed-blue colour palette adds to the gloomy atmosphere, but it still feels pallid, especially on scenes which should be more colourful (e.g. supercomputers flickering in the background).
There's absolutely no voice-over and the number of sound effects is very limited, but the sci-fi themed mysterious/relaxing music with fast-paced futuristic trancelike tunes during combat are top-notch and fit perfectly to the game .
There are so many things crammed into Deep Sky Derelicts and (/but?) it works great as a whole (with a stronger RPG line and more choices it could have been even better). And again: if we can't keep track of the many cards and the effects they cause, the codex is always there to help.
PROS
+ highly enjoyable card battles
+ lots of various effects, items and modifications
+ fairly original and good development system
+ outstanding music
+ handy hint system
CONS
- some classes are way more useful than others
- cheap(ly done) graphics
RATING
8/10

Beautiful, Hidden Gem Award, more people should play this game! Darkest Dungeon but it's a card game. It looks beautiful, the gameplay is deep, fun, and actually well thought through. Character building is super satysfying, exploration is thrilling, combat and combo potential is engaging. 10/10 Game, should be a global hit. An absolute steal on a +80% Sale, but worth the full price imo.

I really loved this game, but I think its worth mentioning that it took some time to grow on me. I think the combat and deck building aspect of the game are deceptively complex, by which I mean it didn't click right away. While the early game is very easy, the difficulty spikes pretty severely around the game's midpoint, and it can become very frustrating if you haven't understood how to properly play the game. However, once it clicks, the game becomes very fun again, provided you can push past that first play-through frustration.
Pros:
- Great music
- great (yet complex) combat/ deck building system that is very rewarding once you master it.
- Great artwork.
Cons:
- Sometimes its possible to click the right mouse button and end up with undesirable results. For example, you can loose the combat rewards or skip a turn with an accidental mouse click. It doesn't happen frequently once you are aware of it, but it is very annoying when it happens.
- Too many enemies have stun abilities, and you can become stun locked, which is boring/ frustrating if it happens several turns in a row. On a similar note, I think Evasion has a similar issue, where enemies evade much more frequently than their Evade % chance would indicate.
- Some of the systems in the game are a bit confusing, and the game doesn't do a great job of explaining them. This makes it so the game becomes very frustrating if you don't know what you are doing. Fortunately, you should be able to get to a point where it makes sense with just a little bit of googling/youtubing, and once you understand how the game works it becomes fun again, but still, I wish the game had been a little more noob friendly
Overall, I think this is a very good game, and I enjoyed my time with it. Its become one of my favorites and one that I think I will probably replay every year or two. Which I think is pretty good for a game I got for 3$ during a steam sale!

I wouldn't use "recommend" it feels out of place for me, I would say that if you like card games you will like Deep sky Derelicts. The downside is that the carrot which is the progress isn't fulfilling (for me), I do fight other enemies and go to other places but it has the same feeling. Maybe because visually rarely anything changes.

This is one of those games where you're thrown into a pretty complicated system with a clear goal and have to stumble your way through it until you learn how do it right. You enter a tile-based map, explore/loot as much as you can, suffer through turn-based combat until your team is nearly wiped out, manage to escape safely, recover your resources, buy persistent upgrades, and repeat this until the map is cleared and a harder one is available. The pacing of the game expects you to figure this out as you go. Enemies and exploration are easier at the start, but money is tight. Once you start figuring things out, completing maps becomes harder but you have more than enough money to experiment with options.
Figuring out how everything worked was pretty fun, but the main interesting mechanic was how the game approaches characters and deck-building. Your characters hold equipment that you can buy or loot, which contributes to their statistics but also adds cards to their personal decks. Your characters use their cards to act in combat, but these cards scale off their stats. You must balance stat upgrades and deck thinning using randomly-generated loot gained from exploration and taking risks. Your characters also belong to certain classes and can level up to receive even more card/stat/effect choices. Starting with a team of very clumsy fools and ending with a team optimised through great ordeal was the main draw of this game for me.
Though the game kept my interest enough to complete a save file, some things did test it. Some mechanics felt a little clunky to me, most disappointingly the bar where you can recruit new characters. You can have ONLY THREE characters in your team, so adding one means deleting another. In the normal game, characters can very easily be revived so you will never have an open slot through circumstance. It would have been much more interesting if character death was punished harder and if you could have more characters in your party but only take three with you when exploring. I ended up not using this mechanic at all due to its strict limitations and lack of necessity. A shame in a game where optimising a variety of characters is the main appeal.
The other thing that really tested my patience was how much of the combat was built around wasting your time. Characters have a miss rate, have evasion chance, can become invisible, can become immune to attacks, can set up cover, can be taunted, can be stunned, can be confused, can be rooted into the ground, can have certain cards blocked, etc. ALL of these options are widely distributed to both the player and the enemies, meaning much of the game is balanced around everybody constantly failing to use their cards. Some fights even take place in terrain that passively makes attack even less accurate on top of all this! This was supremely annoying to me. If you already hate turn-based combat, you will loathe how it is approached here.
Some miscellaneous thoughts:
- The game looks very cool visually and I especially liked how the robots and armour looked.
- The quests are mostly simple fetch quests but they were fine as side goals. Some characters will ramble quite a bit and I didn't really care because I was never going to see them again once I completed the fetch quests they were tied to.
- The only time I felt invested in the lore was during the conversation with the final boss because he was actually somebody important and the stuff he was explaining was pretty interesting. Too bad he was way too easy to defeat, but the final map was pretty cool, I guess.
- The DLCs add some neat stuff but they are not necessary to the overall vibe and progression of the game.
- The achievements are pretty wack for this game, which might suck for achievement hunters.
- Menus also were sometimes bugged for me, requiring restarts.
Overall, this game has a fun gameplay loop and a good sense of progression.
Don't give this game a "miss"!
Don't "evade" this experience!
This video game will leave you "stunned"!
And so on...

The game has solid mechanics, but also a lot of game-breaking bugs and a visual and auditory experience that flatlines very fast. There's a lot of room for growth and depth in the game's mechanics and audio-viz experience that just never happen.
I bought this game on Steam sale for $2.99 and its worth every penny, but if I bought it at $20 I would feel either meh or mildly annoyed due to the bugs and lack of intrigue. About 25% of the time I boot the game up, it freezes and and I have to force close it while on a high end PC. There are additional bugs in-game that cause a headache.
It's hard to find a great turn-based party rpg that isn't an anime JRPG with compelling art and style in the veins of Urtuk: The Desolation, Darkest Dungeon, Shadowrun or Banner Saga. This game ticked a lot of those boxes for me, with card mechanics and rogue-lite elements keeping things unpredictable. After 14 hours, I've enjoyed myself, I'm on level 5 of 10 and I still don't even see the end game in the distance, but I'm losing interest.
The main reason for losing interest for me is the lack of change in what I'm experiencing. The character's stats change and
the enemies change but most of the game just feels the same. Most of the game feels like a gear grind, with silly narrative and dialogue that may as well be omitted. I definitely don't feel like there is any global quest or journey to strive toward. The visuals, environment and music stay mostly static for the entire game.
The music is exciting at first, but there's really only one short track that plays on repeat.
I feel like I'm seeing the same ~10 backgrounds every battle.
Characters have only handful of customized visual differences that barely feel different. Gear does not change visual appearance.
Animations are extremely basic.
Quests are ridiculously simple, lack meaningful decision making.
The combat mechanics are solid.

Overall a positive experience of a nice deckbuilder.
Has some replay value for 1 or 2 replays, but unfortunately requires MUCH much more if you want to 100% it - damn you the RNG-based achievements!