I pretty much would like to read your full review of Might & Magic X, Grimoire and Star Crawlers. Please, do them
On Star Crawlers. I started this game in summer 2017, which just happened to coincide with the graphic card of my previously computer dying a slow death. After 15 hours into the game I had an awful crash with corrupted all of my saves. This happened again about 6 months later with Ruzar the Lifestone, so I don't blame the game itself. I would have finished it, had my saved games not been destroyed, and I will return to it at some point, but at the moment I have a number of other blobbers in my backlog, which I'd like to give a try first. So these are my impressions from 15 hours of the game.
I think Starcrawlers has a neat, very atmospheric graphic style, which was very clearly inspired by Star Wars, also the setting in pretty unique for this type of game. Starcrawlers is set in a cold war between megacorporations, pirates, and rebels. The faction system plays a big role both in the story and in gameplay as most jobs you do will benefit one faction while hurting another.
Starcrawlers has 8 unique classes (for four characters), which each have 3 skill trees, like we know from Diablo 2. Each class plays differently and can be built differently, so like a classical blobber, there is a lot of ways to play the game.
So far, so good.
Starcrawler's has well done main missions in which revolve around fetching the blackbox of a wrecked ship. Who you give the box too, leads to playing for one of the game's factions. The main missions are well designed and add a nice bit of variety. In between you are offered procedurally generated side missions which are kind of generic, and you see more of the same enemies from the main missions. Building a reputation with a faction does open up extra gear for your character, which is motivation enough to do side missions early on. You simply can't hop from main mission to main mission, because eventually the difficulty will spike too much.
Starcrawler's combat has many modern elements like tanking and cooldowns. For all these to work well, combat usually takes a fair number of rounds, and is much longer than a combat in most blobbers. To be fair so long as combat is reasonably challenging it can be fun. The problem comes when combat is too easy or too hard. I started on normal difficulty and found it too easy. I never felt in danger, because while it took awhile to beat enemies, they dealt out only negligable damage. When playing on too hard of difficulty its even worse since you just seem to be scratching opponents and combat can take forever. Most more classical games like Wizardry 7 feature easy combat where you can destroy enemies in one round, while when its very hard you can be wiped out in one round. While this isn't so compatibable with Starcrawler's cooldown system, I find it much preferable, since you are not stuck in unchallenging or hopeless combat for too long.
So, I liked Starcrawlers, but found the combat less enjoyable than either MMX or Grimoire, which is unfortunate, because I otherwise think its a good game.