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…

I feel I've played this long enough to give a review now. Assuming the game can only get better from here and in no particular order: [u][b]Pros:[/b][/u] [list] [*]Pretty typical combat feel for a game of this genre, but with "danger zones" serving to telegraph some attacks or highlight positions you don't want to stay in. [*]Lots of options for designing your ship and even using designs others have shared. [*]Ship construction is mostly cosmetic. In that only the outline/diameter actually impacts stats, for the most part. [*]Loot has some RNG, but not so much that you feel like you have to make the game your job. Especially with the upgrade systems. [*]Multiplayer. [*]Custom Avatar Images. [*]Quite a few different weapon types and often different skins for each of those types. [*]A lot of "accessibility" options. My favorite is 200% game speed. [*]A responsive/active Dev that does actually add some things that have been requested. [*]Mod support. [/list] [u][b]Cons:[/b][/u] [list] [*]Maps are a whole bunch of little nodes, representing different systems and encounter types. Each time you move to a new system/node you will get a loading screen. The loading screens are short, bu…

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.

7/10 Fun, but way too easy. Nice to just hop in for an hour of carnage. Not much replay value ATM. Shared space is nice, but not enough gear storage on the ship. Ship builder is easy to use, but not a lot of options. I wish that there were more ways to sort your gear stash; sear for maxed stats, specific stats, specific types. Same for selling, at this point anything non artifact or lacking a maxed stat is vendor trash, I feel like i spend too much time looking at and selling crap gear. Currently playing with difficulty slider maxed out. Serious balance issues. Right now there is no reason to use anything other than hull steal and stacked halos. Shields are worthless as they get instantly shredded. With hull steal and halos, the only time I ever get threatened is when you run out of adds to leach hull from. There is literally no downside to using only halo's, they generate no heat, take no ammo, and hit everything around you. I did not even max out the weapons tree for halo's and it was already a cakewalk. Use one of each debuff type and everything gets every single debuff and disintegrates while within your sphere of influence. Use a holo ship device and you…

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.