The gameplay loop: As shown in the trailer, you're building a deck of card effects to battle between linear spaceships sliding back and forth and firing at each other in turns. There's a huge amount of variety beyond the basic attack, movement, and shield mechanics.

This game thrives on the character interactions as much as the gameplay. Even if you're not a pro at deckbuilders the Normal mode is forgiving enough to have fun, and cards and artifacts that are suboptimal are still fun to mess around with.

You're given small blurbs of what a character does in the world by hovering over their portraits, but it's by their interactions with one another, and the past cutscenes you uncover, that you really get to know them. It is definitely worth playing with many different crew combinations to see the interplay between them, both from a character standpoint and mechanics wise.

The music is wonderful and the ending sequence is well worth the slow burn--and not too slow either. And even after that there's incentive to keep playing. I'd recommend buying the soundtrack but not listening to it until you've watched the end credits roll--some of the tracks just hit harder in game. I actually cried in part of the ending sequence.

If you're new to deckbuilders, and you have trouble getting good draws, I'd suggest putting more focus into keeping your desk size down. When I started out I was tempted by all the interesting new mechanics, and it is definitely worth unlocking all the cards to see how they work. The "basic" cards can be upgraded to have zero cost, and that helps save energy for other things.

The gameplay loop: As shown in the trailer, you're building a deck of card effects to battle between linear spaceships sliding back and forth and firing at each other in turns. There's a huge amount of variety beyond the basic attack, movement, and shield mechanics. This game thrives on the character interactions as much as the gameplay. Even if you're not a pro at deckbuilders the Normal mode is forgiving enough to have fun, and cards and artifacts that are suboptimal are still fun to mess around with. You're given small blurbs of what a character does in the world by hovering over their portraits, but it's by their interactions with one another, and the past cutscenes you uncover, that you really get to know them. It is definitely worth playing with many different crew combinations to see the interplay between them, both from a character standpoint and mechanics wise. The music is wonderful and the ending sequence is well worth the slow burn--and not [i]too[/i] slow either. And even after that there's incentive to keep playing. I'd recommend buying the soundtrack but not listening to it until you've watched the end credits roll--some of the tracks just hit harder in game. I actually cried in part of the ending sequence. If you're new to deckbuilders, and you have trouble getting good draws, I'd suggest putting more focus into keeping your desk size down. When I started out I was tempted by all the interesting new mechanics, and it is definitely worth unlocking all the cards to see how they work. The "basic" cards can be upgraded to have zero cost, and that helps save energy for other things.