I'm not sure why it says Early Access for Linux as I played the full version. I started off liking Starcrawlers a lot more than I expected to. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but it is basically a turn based Legend of Grimrock in space and that is an awesome combo. I could also describe Starcrawlers as a first person version of Shadowrunners that is scifi as opposed to cyberpunk based but it isn’t as accurate as Starcrawlers has much less dialogue choices than the Shadowrunner games. Starcrawlers has many good qualities and few downsides although the downsides are pretty annoying and ended up ruining my enjoyment.
You start off by picking a class and assigning your points to different attributes and special attacks you can upgrade. You can really tailor your character to different playstyles and I felt like I could play how I wanted without having to compromise much. You can also hire additional crawlers, something you pretty much have to do as doing many missions solo is suicide. You can pick which ones to go on mission with based on which ones suit your needs and play styles. Having the engineer or hacker on your team gives you additonal options in terms of how to deal with locked doors and having additional dialogue options with enemies. This is true of many of the different classes which is great. You can distribute loot to your crew to get them better armor or weapons. You can sell some loot on the black market at auctions and most other loot at the local shop. You can either increase or decrease your standing with various factions based on the missions you accept and the loot you steal. Obviously selling company secrets won’t earn you any praise from that company when they find out. Accepting a mission to raid an office will earn you praise from the faction that employs you but earn you the wrath of whose office is being raided. This is an awesome concept but at the end of the day I found it all had little impact on the story or gameplay. Factions I had great standing with offered me nothing except a few extra credits and the odd deal on a weapon while having a faction hate me never impacted me in a negative way. They never sent people after me or anything else. Some downsides to the game was the procedural generation of the maps. It would have been painfully clear to me if I hadn’t already known as most maps are very similar and only have about three or four variations that the majority of maps are made from. There is an overarching story and story missions to progress with but there are a lot of optional side missions you can choose to do. Also there is one mission, where you have to trap an enemy called a “Gorzilla” that made me quit the game I hated it so much. The game is a first person dungeon crawler up until you have to get into a stupid puzzle trying to trap this thing. If I wanted a puzzle game I would have went to play one but this felt out of place and unneeded. It is a story mission and can’t be completed without this puzzle. Up until this misison I was enjoying it. The turn based combat was great, felt like a space based JRPG.
I played Starcrawlers on Linux. It never crashed once on me. It has options for Vsync, AA, AF, an FOV slider that goes up to 100, three other graphics options, it has manual saving outside of combat, and runs great. It used no more than 11% of my CPU and my system usage for RAM was no more than 4GB while playing. ALT-Tab didn’t work. I used version 1_1_3_3_27395 from GOG. The install size was only 2.1GB.
Overall I wanted to like Starcrawlers. It has many good qualities to it but be warned about the odd stupid mission such as the Gorzilla mission and it’s puzzles. If you don’t mind puzzles and enjoy games such as Legend of Grimrock or Shadowrunner than you will probably have a good time with Starcawlers. I received Starcrawlers for free from GOG but would say it is worth $25 if it didn’t have that puzzle mission but only $10 with it.
My Score: 6.5/10
My system Used:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.0.2 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Mate | Kernel 5.0.7-1-MANJARO