Star Vortex (2025)

Fantastic Game! Writing this as of 0.8.1 (Early Access). I put nearly 26 hours into this game in 48 hours.. It's addictively fun because you are always making progress and the build diversity is huge. The Dev is hands on and passionate about ARPG and Space.... Win/Win 0. That right we start with 0 cause I had to edit this. The ship designer is brilliant! No weird snapping or rules saying you cant place something. Just pick items and build your ship however you want with one of the smartest systems ever put into a game. Change individual parts, colors, placements (even if they overlap). Do what you want. Its like making paper cutouts of shapes and literally placing them where you want and coloring them as you see fit. Your weapon slots can be put almost anywhere. 100% freedom! 1. You have your ARPG items with quality variants as expected. However, you can swap a stat from a similar item over to your other item. You can swap stats onto or off of a blueprint. You can increase the level or rarity of those items in a simple fashion if you have the currency or materials. Nothing is useless. This is one of the most well thought-out and simple crafting proces…

Took me 10 hours to work out where I was trying to go and why, cos the battling is the fun, early on, but focus on the long as well as the short term.

I like the fully customizable difficulty settings, so you can tweak things just how you want. The ship designer is decent. Though I think it'll need someone more skilled than me to fully make use of it. Personally I prefer simpler geometric shapes you can piece together. But if you have the skill for it, you can probably work wonders with how it layer things. I love the way you aren't actually locked into something when you make a char. You do have a limited number of skill points, but you can access everything as a single char. And the loadout system even allows you to basically save full different builds, including skills and equipment, so it's like having multiple chars in one. But you only need to level to max once. And well, as of this review, I'm approaching the current cap of 100, but not there yet. So it's nice not having to do the grind again. But even if you want to grind from the beginning, you can still transfer good gear to new chars, and down level them so they can actually use it. So that is nice. For gear, there are currently only a few things that matter, so to speak, whether it has the reduced Level Requirement free modifier, and whether it's the actual …

Game is genuinely incredible. It's hard to believe it's a solo dev tbh. It's that good. The demo alone can last you days with 8 player coop. It's incredibly moddable. The depth and breadth of options is fantastic. Absolutely a must try for anyone who likes ARPGs, space games like Neon Striker, or just games with high potential build complexity. Afaik there's even a socketing system coming soonTM.

Disclosure: I received a key for this game after the developer visited a Twitch stream that was streaming this game. Star Vortex is a top down space shooter ARPG with a satirical sense of humour and Borderlands/Diablo style loot tables to upgrade your ship. As you level up, you get better loot and even the option of completely rebuilding the shape of your ship (within level-scaling limits) with multiple weapon types such as laser beams, missiles, drones, mines, pulse halos, black hole guns, and more. Play around with different weapons to suit your playstyle. The accessibility, replayability, and customisability is incredible. Session times can take as much or as little as you like and there's no pressure to progress if you just need a distraction during 10 minutes of downtime. You can have multiple save files if you like with the option of transferring loot between them, and you can increase or decrease the difficulty at the main menu. Heck, you can reset the galaxy progress or regenerate it completely with a random seed if you feel so inclined! The optional Twitch integration is also an unexpected but pretty neat addition, allowing your community to interact with the game with …

The game doesn't have as much variety as I'd like, but it's fun to play and collecting the necessary items is enjoyable. QoL and optimisation presents. Roadmap looks optimistic. Game updates constantly.