Star Renegades

✔ exceptionally good turn based combat, with a lot of focus on turn order and controlling enemies in such a way to not let them act as much as possible
✔ runs start with 3 characters and you build the squad up to 5
✔ combat is almost completely deterministic and you are even told what the enemy is planning to do. Unfortunately there are a few attacks, which target random enemies. No idea why these exist, but they are rare, so it's not a big issue
✔ there are healers... but you don't need them! it seems viable to run with a team without any sustain capability (at least on lower difficulty levels)
✔ on top of that losing a character or two doesn't have to mean a wipe. There is no mid-combat resurrection, but if you know what you are doing and how to beat the enemy then losing crucial party members in the middle of a long boss fight isn't necessarily the end
✔ life/armor/energy shield as three defensive stats, with interesting mechanics
❔ a lot of difficulty levels, but they unlock one after another and you have to start from normal (I beat the game on normal and harsh, with no failed runs)
❔ 6+ hour runs
❔ some stats persist between combat encounters, which is fine, except for the Fury meter, which is generated on attacks/kills and allows you to use special attacks (ultimates, kind of). The difference between having a full or empty Fury meter at the beginning of combat is too big
❔ story is very bare-bones, but that's not the focus here
✘ extremely slow perma progression when it comes to progenies (different version of playable characters, allowing for more squad customization) and item unlocks
✘ as mentioned the game shows you what damage your team is going to take and how much damage you will do with your skills. Unfortunately, in many cases it simply lies. It doesn't update when a character taunts, which is easy to remember. But there were damage dealing abilities, both from my side and enemy side that did far more (or far less) than the UI forecasted
✘ gets repetitive. At least for me it's repetitive enough that I don't want to make more full runs with slightly different squad composition just to get to the true ending

The fact that I keep coming back to trying another, harder run every few months is a testament how much I like how Star Renegades plays, looks and sounds. Finishing a run is insanely fulfilling. It's just really hard to justify investing time because the formula barely changes but runs take 4–6 hours and could end after the second bad decision.
Dialog is astonishingly cringe sadly. I hope no developer ever believes that it's a good idea to put this marvel-ass-shit in a game again.

I love this game so much

As someone who put thousands of hours in roguelikes/lites where game design is completely dominated by this inane, archaic d20 system i've grown to absolutely despise over the years, Star Renegades is one of the only game in the genre which actually lets practically nothing to luck

You get familiar with the basics and all that's required of you is to make informed decisions to win your fights

No "lmao mandatory 5% to fail everything you fucking do, oh you had to breath, no, crit fail now press quickload or alt+f4 and then go on the reddit/forums to roleplay as someone who never does"

There's barely any hindsight dirty tricks too, maybe once for some bosses, but not all of them either

It's such a breath of fresh air

Great game design, the soundtrack is astounding, the dry cynical humor is hilarious most of the time, replayable ad nauseam

I wish they'd come back, i'd buy DLCs without even blinking

I wish game designers would leave the d20 to rot in a ditch where it belongs

Sit down, friends. It's story time.
3 years ago I tried this out on Gamepass. I use the same "2 hour refund rule" from Steam to judge if it's worth playing past that point. 2 hours in, I "refunded" it. It wasn't bad...just wasn't worth my limited time. So, I uninstalled the game, wrote it off, and forgot about it.
Until a couple of weeks ago.
I was hankering for a party-based roguelite, and I saw this on sale for $5 on GMG. I figured, whatever, it's got good reviews and it's had some updates. I'll try it again. At that same 2-hour point, I was a little bored. It seemed neat, but I was steamrolling everything, and it felt like they'd made a great system and underutilized it. For reference point, 2 hours took me through the tutorial and 1st planet. Since I'd bought the game this time, I was a bit more committed. I pressed on.
On the 2nd planet (of 3 per run, plus the last part), the system was opening up. The 4th character added a new dimension, and the game was a tad more challenging. Still easy, but I could see there was more to the game. The 3rd planet (about 4 hours in now) hooked me. You start to see the interesting tactical elements of the battles and compelling strategic decisions of building your party. I will say that at no point before the final 2 bosses did I feel challenged on the first run. I would've been irked to have to replay that. If you've played a lot of challenging turn based games, you'll probably feel similarly.
Fortunately, I beat the game and unlocked the next difficulty. There are 9 difficulty levels total. You start with only the 2 easiest and must unlock the harder ones by winning runs as typical in a roguelite. This third difficulty is when the game started to shine, and all of the neat elements of that first playthrough came together. I started experimenting (and failing) with party builds and saw much room for replay and challenge the game held. Building your party up, choosing how to divide the XP, selecting rewards, all of these mid-run decisions are fantastic.
Best of all, the roguelite meta progression doesn't feel mandatory to progress for a given unlocked difficulty. There are a lot of horizontal upgrades (and more choices do help, but they're a double-edged sword when inexperienced). The vertical upgrades rely on equipment unlocks, so you may or may not even see those in a run. I feel you get more than enough unlocks from winning a run to tackle the next difficulty. That's how I like it - a nice progressive challenge that tests my skill, rather than my (im)patience for grinding.
There are 2 cons to the game:
- Predictions aren't 100% accurate. This will occasionally be frustrating. I've never lost of a battle because of it, and I'm starting to see the edge cases where this happens, but it's a con for such a deterministic battle system with a high skill cap.
- The writing is big time hit or miss. There is a lot of bad dialogue. You can turn it all off though, so it's not the worst. That said, there are enough chuckle moments to compel me to leave it on, and I appreciate that they've given their characters some personality. That's a rarity in a roguelite. I can only think of 2 others that do this - Hades and Chrono Ark - and big picture, I like the addition. Hopefully, they hire a writer for their next game to clean things up a bit.
If you're at all considering this, give this game a go. Just know that 2 hours isn't enough time to give it a fair shake.

Nice little indie games consisting of Final Fantasy-like turn based combats with a spin. The spin is that you know what the enemies are going to do in their turn and you have to plan accordingly and react to their attacks.
Graphics are quite nice, story is okay and for a small amount of money you have some hours of decent fun. Support the devs :)
Add some bonus points if you're into rogue-lite games and anime-graphics :)

Absolutely blown away at how fast 5 hours went.. This game is insanely addictive. After losing to the first real boss i was distraught until i saw the roguelike bonuses stacking. Ok i though, ill give it another run. Same thing, lost on the first big guy but after the 3 or 4th run i had enough to unlock a new character, and some new items. Combined with run bonuses I easily beat that big robot and it was wonderful.
Easily the best game ive played since baldurs gate 3, worth every penny.

This is a really beautiful hand-drawn (i believe) pixel art, turn-based RPG, or Roguelite, idk game genres really well.
Anyways, one of the first things you notice when you play this game is the beauty of it in battles. The visual effects are really well done, although the UI in battles (And sometimes out of battles!) can feel cluttered at times and you will feel a bit overwhelmed with the amount of things and text on it, although at least for me, it wasn't really an issue anymore as i did get familiar with it at around 2 hours in. I do feel like it could be better made or organized though, but I don't really know how to give any suggestions as I'm not a game UI designer or whatever. I would rate the UI 6/10, i guess.
As for the battles themselves, I do personally find them really fun. It takes a bit to get accustomed to taking in near-future things that will happen in the battle and then using that info to make better moves and plays, but I do find it adds a layer of strategy. And yes, i guess you could say the battles are *kind of* repetitive, but i never really got bored in battles. I saw some other reviews mention how you can basically win any battle by just repeatedly stunning the enemies or some similar mechanic, but so far i haven't really been able to do that. However i *am* just 4 hours in, soo yeah.
There are a lot of characters that you would unlock as time passes by earning stuff through each "mission". I found this system similar to Hades, where you do runs to escape. And then, when you die or successfully escape, you get sent back home where you can upgrade your abilities, etc. And in Hades nothing really changes or gets harder each time you die. Well in this game, bosses and elite characters (i forgot what they're called) do get promotions and upgrades each time you die and fail a mission, so that makes dying actually bad.
As for out of battles.. meh. There really isn't much stuff to do at all on the maps while you're just walking around, except interact with stuff like buildings to see a bit of dialogue and "unbelievably bad humor" (quote from other reviews, although i did sometimes laugh at it) from your squad. Maps should have more stuff to do outside of battle. I guess you can count the camping mechanic as something to do out of battle in the maps, but that's basically just improving relationships between characters, and using these so-called cards to heal or get temporary buffs for upcoming battles.
If you're wondering about the story and character progression.. well it's basically non-existent. Sure, you have some dialogue if you improve the relationships of characters, and some story in the beginning of the game, but that's about it. If you're looking for a good story, this game really isn't the one for you.
Oh, and also the devs have basically completely abandoned this game because of "future projects". The latest update was 2 years ago. The post that the developers made (also around 2 years ago) was that they don't have a big enough budget to continue working on this game, especially when it didn't earn them as much revenue as expected, and that "it would be more beneficial to continue working on future projects and releases", so don't expect any future updates to come, bugs to be fixed (which i haven't encountered so far), and suggestions to be implemented.
However, even with all of these negatives, i do think you should definitely get this game if it's on sale. I do really find it fun to play when you get obliterated in FPS games and lose the desire to play them for the day, so that's something. But i don't think it's worth it at all at full price honestly.