INTRO:
Card Hunter may only have been an above-average success. However, it is one of few games that are effective at implementing deck-building into otherwise typical turn-based party-versus-party combat. Since then, there has been quite a number of games that use similar mechanisms.
Unfortunately, there are some of these that do little more for the things around this gameplay. Deep Sky Derelicts is one of them.
PREMISE:
The game takes place in a far-flung sci-fi future, when humanity presumably has expanded to the stars. In the region of space that the game takes place in, a considerable subset of humanity lives in space stations. Living space is at a premium. A horrible end is just a few inches or less away, specifically the thickness of the vessel’s hull.
In fact, there are people who are “stateless”, i.e. people who are not granted living space by those who control viable real estate in space (including inhabitable worlds). They live hard lives, often having to scrounge for resources.
Perhaps the proverbial elephant in the room – or in space, to be specific – is that this region of space has many alien-made space vessels that have long since been abandoned. Catastrophic failures, cosmic diseases and alien life-forms rendered many of these dangerous over the years. Yet, these places – called the eponymous “derelicts” – happen to be the sources of livelihood for many humans, including the stateless.
There are scavengers looking to salvage anything of worth from the derelicts. Some of the derelicts have been half-heartedly claimed by space-based corporations for their out-of-the-books dealings. There are cultist and hunter teams looking for things on the derelicts. There are also those who are trying to rebuild sections of the derelicts to live in. Perhaps even more darkly, people frequently die in the derelicts, so there is some revenue to be had from recovering their equipment.
The player characters are a team of salvagers, one that had proven at least able at dealing with the basics of exploring the derelicts. The salvagers have been contracted by the master of the space station in the eponymous Deep Sky sector. They are to find the “Mothership”, a near-mythical colossal space vessel that can reputedly reveal the technology behind these alien vessels.
The problem is that its location is unknown. The only clue is that the “Mothership” is the progenitor of many other space vessels, namely the derelicts. The databases of the derelicts contain clues to where it is. Therefore, the player characters must visit many derelicts to find the databases, while coming across various obstacles along the way.
With such a set-up, there could have been riveting story-telling. Unfortunately, any attempt at story-telling is hampered by the unimpressive gameplay.
IRON-MAN OR NOT:
There are two modes for a playthrough. One mode lets the player make multiple game-saves (albeit in a clunky manner). The other gives just one auto-save. The harsher mode also inflicts permanent death on player characters that go down. In either case, the game will update the game-saves whenever the player returns to the station or goes to a derelict. In addition, the “Iron Man” mode will make a game-save after every battle that has been resolved (whether through victory or through retreat).
THE SPACE STATION:
The space station of the employer of the player characters is their base of operations, after having been given permissions to use it as such – provided that they can pay for its services of course. The space station has several facilities that are of use to the player characters.
The first and perhaps foremost is the equipment store. The player buys and sells stuff here, though doing so is not convenient due to the rudimentary user interface that lacks features such as sorting algorithms. Its offerings change every time that the player returns from anywhere outside, so the player would not be found wanting for supplies. It may even have the occasional gem of a gear piece.
Next, there is the “Lair” pub, where contracts are made. These can be contract offers from small-time employers, who essentially send the player characters on rather simple quests. The player can also hire replacement party members here – emphasis on “replacement”, as will be elaborated later.
The clinic is where the player characters receive treatment for injuries. All HP losses are irrecoverable until the player characters return to the clinic, so the clinic will be seeing a lot of the player’s money. The clinic is also where the player redistributes the ability points of the characters. (This was a feature that was implemented long after the release of the game, by the way.)
The workshop is where the player’s team can receive upgrades to their scanner and energy systems. The upgrades are a bit costly, but a team that has made it to level 5 is likely wealthy enough to purchase every upgrade.
In the base game, the station is as dull as the abovementioned passages imply. In fact, there is a priced DLC that is intended to spice up the station’s happenings.
CURRENCY:
The currency that is used on the station (and by NPCs on the derelicts) is called “cc”. For the ease of the implementation of contexts in this article, it will just be called “money”. After all, there really is no narrative significance to “cc”; it is just another currency, and there is little backstory about the interstellar economy in the story’s setting.
Almost every service in the space station requires money up-front, including the clinic. Running out of money can be deleterious, so the player will want to carefully manage the consumption of resources.
As for revenues, money is obtained from selling salvage and functional equipment that has been collected from the derelicts. There is also the money from completed contracts.
Players who are already experienced in economic min-maxing would find it easy to build up a budget surplus. Indeed, at the end of the playthrough, the player would be so flush with cash from selling vendor trash. That said, if there is any reason to pursue contracts, it is the experience points that they grant.
Other than the purchase of the occasional amped-up piece of gear at the pawn shop, there would be few other things worth spending on in the late-game.
It should be mentioned here that the station master will not pay the player for any data that has been collected from the derelicts. Rather, the station master is already footing the cost of sending the team about (at least on the default game mode). Still, the main contracts grant experience points that the player may want.
GETTING THE PAY-DATA:
The main goal of the gameplay is to explore the derelicts and find the room that contains the navigation data of the derelict. The data may be either in an “astrosphere” or in an actual database. In the case of the former, the player would meet the “stargazers”, cybernetic creatures that once piloted the derelicts prior to their abandonment. In the case of the latter, the database is usually managed by an AI that may be crazy; there may also be a guardian creature.
The first few derelicts would yield their data readily after the player has found the rooms. In these cases, the keepers of the data are subservient enough to make this a simple matter.
The later ones, however, have keepers that are much less cooperative. Most of them will require the player to do quests before they will yield the data. All of these quests can be performed within the same derelicts, though the amount of backtracking can vary wildly.
Getting the data back to the station master unlocks more derelicts. This is the only way to get more enemies to fight and more loot to sell or equip the player characters with. Yet, the derelicts can only offer so many of these before they are exhausted.
LIMITED INVENTORY SPACE:
The player can only have around one hundred or so items in the inventory. Items do not stack, by the way. Thus, the player will have to frequently clean out unwanted items. This is tedious, and would have been even more so if not for the sorting feature. That said, the player must sort the inventory before going to the shop to sell them, because the sorting feature is not available in the UI for the shop.
If the player runs out of inventory space during exploration of the derelicts, the player can just leave loot where they are; the game will record their whereabouts in the game-save. Alternatively, the player could just convert items into energy (more on this later), but this is generally an act of desperation borne out of poor planning.
HEALTH:
Player characters have health pools that depend on their chosen profession; Bruisers typically have the most, followed by Scrappers. Nonetheless, no matter how high their health are, the moment that a team member takes damage to health is the moment when the proverbial turd has hit the fan.
This is because health cannot be restored without the aid of the clinic. There is the medic’s healing abilities, but these grant temporary health that is only valid for the current run. The game does track the amount of temporary health that a team mate has gained, and will subtract this away when the team returns to the station. This will not kill a team mate, but will put him/her sorely in need for healing.
There are vestiges of gameplay designs about item-based health restoration that have been abandoned. For example, certain traders on the derelicts sell medical goods that do not have working functions.
Furthermore, perhaps amusingly, the cost to heal a team mate at the clinic is greater if they have lost more hitpoints, numerically. This means that tough but badly injured team mates can be expensive to heal. As the game would point out, the player will want to keep injuries to a minimum if the player wants to turn a profit, especially in the early-game. (For that matter, replacing a slain team-mate is still much more expensive than healing the team-mate.)
That said, characters continue to function at full performance no matter how low their health gets.
OTHER STATISTICS:
The other statistics are variables that followers of turn-based combat would recognize. For example, there is initiative, which determines who goes first. (There will be more elaboration on the turn-based combat later.) For another example, there are armor ratings and damage resistances, both of which reduce damage that has been inflicted on a character.
In the case of the player characters, they have skill ratings that determine how effective their moves are. The skill ratings are what makes them different from most enemies that they would fight, because these are some of the means with which they compensate for their lack of numbers. The skill ratings will be described later together with the types of cards, because the skills are associated with the card types anyway.
SOURCES OF STATISTICS:
The numbers that contribute to the statistics either come from a player character’s abilities or his/her gear. The former case is a relatively simple either/or decision; any abilities that provide cards do not provide statistical bonuses, and vice versa. The latter case often has statistical numbers worked in together with cards, which can complicate the equipping of player characters.
As a rule of thumb, the player will want to focus on the statistics that determine the effectiveness of cards and those that determine who goes first. The latter is important because the sequence of cards that get played during a fight will matter, e.g. cards that shut down opponents should be played as early as possible.
NO AID FOR GEAR COMPARISONS:
Unfortunately, the game lacks any feature that aids the comparison of one piece of gear to another one, especially the one that is being currently used. This feature is in other gear-centric games of the present-day that have been competently designed. This gives the impression that Deep Sky Derelicts has been developed by people who have not kept up with the times.
SKILL RATINGS & TYPES OF CARDS:
Any player character has a set of skill ratings. The ratings increase as he/she increases in levels, though certain ratings increase at rates different from the others’, depending on their professions. Consequently, the player characters may have some ratings higher than the rest. For example, the Scrapper, being the premier salvager of the team, has a Scavenge rating that is higher than his/her other ratings, and likely the Scavenge ratings of any other profession.
The skill ratings determine the effectiveness of their associated cards. Incidentally, there is a colour coding system that associates the type of cards with the skill ratings. This can be a problem to people who have colour-blindness for the hues that are used.
CARD DECKS – IN GENERAL:
The main gameplay element is the construction of card decks. There are two sources of cards: those from the player character’s abilities, and those from his/her gear.
The cards from abilities are unique to the profession of the player character. Their effectiveness may either depend on an associated skill rating, or they depend on the weapons that the player character is using. This dependency is generally depicted through the typifying of the cards. For example, the Scrapper’s Lout Drone is derived from his/her ability and its performance is determined by his/her Scavenge rating.
Not unlike Card Hunter, cards are packaged into pieces of gear. The types of cards that a piece of gear has are typically determined by the type of the gear itself. This means that player characters of different professions can have the same cards as each other, as long as these cards are obtained from pieces of gear that they can use interchangeably.
In addition to considering the cards that go into the decks of player characters, the player should consider how their skill ratings and statistics affect the potency of the cards. For example, Mental cards are best used by someone with a high Mental rating.
GEAR:
The gear that player characters can use can be categorized according to two overarching item types: cores and mods. The cores are presumably devices that they insert or install into their powered suits. Cores also include any weapons, gameplay-wise. The mods are in turn additional devices that are inserted into the cores.
Cores always have statistical numbers and cards, no matter how few of them. Their statistical numbers usually affect the cards that they and their mods have, but they may also affect some cards from the player character’s abilities. For example, the Scrapper’s Dirty Punch card may have come from his/her ability, but its damage output is determined by the damage output of his/her power glove.
Mods are meant to grant more cards to the core, and most of them also have statistical bonuses that augment the core further. Some mods may not have any cards at all, and some others have cards but no statistical bonuses.
The performance of the cards that the core and its mods have is dependent the core’s finalized statistics. For example, the damage of a Spread Weapon card depends on the finalized damage output of the Spread Weapon, but attack cards of other types will not be affected.
NOT EQUIPPING GEAR TO MINIMIZE DECKS:
One of the inherent caveats of deck-building games is that having too many cards diminish the chances of desired cards being drawn. Thus, one of the tricks that people who play deck-building games do is to minimize the number of cards in their decks. This makes them more vulnerable to tactics that disable cards, because they lack spare cards in such a situation. However, the benefit of being able to more reliably draw desired cards can be a worthwhile advantage.
In the case of this game, this can be done by removing any piece of gear from a player character’s loadout. For example, the Psyker specialization has cards that can bypass enemies’ toughness and even evasion ratings, as well as reduce their competency. These cards may be all that the player character needs for his/her offensive capabilities, but the cards from his/her weapons are in the way. Therefore, the player might want to have this character not equip any weapons so as not to have any weapon-given cards.
MINOR ISSUE IN UNEQUIPPING THINGS:
Unfortunately, the attempt to unequip things might reveal another design gap with the user interface for inventory management. Specifically, in order to remove a piece of gear from a slot, the player must hold down and drag the sprite for the piece of gear, while the inventory screen is at its default state without any filters. This is never mentioned anywhere in the in-game documentation.
PROFESSION-SPECIFIC WEAPONS:
For better or worse, the weapons that a character can use is determined by his/her profession. For example, the Leader can only wield an Energy Blade and a Light Ranged Weapon. For another example, the Scrapper has a comparatively versatile choice in ranged weapons, because he/she can use Spread, Precision and Assault weapons. However, his/her melee weapon must be a Power Glove. Perhaps the strictest example is the Bruiser, who can only ever have a Heavy Melee weapon.
This is very important to keep in mind, because each type of weapon has its own unique range of cards.
In the case of the Spread Weapons, their kind of differentiation is even more notable, mainly because all of their cards can hit multiple targets by spreading their damage infliction around. Professions that are about applying de-buffs on targets that are hit will likely benefit from the use of these guns.
SHIELD CORES & SHIELDS:
Every player character has one shield core, and only ever one. It is a must-have, because shields are the first and most reliable line of defence that any character has.
In addition to giving shields to a character, the shield core also grants shield-related cards. The most common and reliable of these are shield-replenishing ones. Unless the player is going for rush-down strategies, the player might want to have some of these cards. Besides, shields do not replenish automatically.
Shielding cards are always Tech cards, which means that any Tech tool and the character’s Tech rating determine their effectiveness. To prevent this from becoming a problem for characters who are not tech-oriented, most of the shield cards have a significant minimum level of effect. For example, Recharge Shields always restores at least one third of a character’s shields.
Shields are restored after combat, but only after the player’s team has moved one square.
TOOLS:
Tools are where the various professions get the most versatility in their gear load-out. All characters can have at least one Tool core. Technically-inclined professions like the Technician and the Medic can have two of the cores, which give the player more choices on how to develop them as support characters.
As for the Tool cores, there are three types, any of which can be used by anyone for whatever reason that the player deems fit.
There is the Tech tool, which can grant more shield-manipulating cards. Alternatively, it may also give cards that summon support drones into combat.
There is the Medic tool, which grant buff and de-buff cards. The most notable of these cards are the ones that remove status effects. Incidentally, the Surgeon specialization can make the most of these, though that specialization has its own ability-derived cards, which are better.
There is the “Weapon tool”, which is technically something that stores ordnance (or makes them). Its cards tend to be grenades or weapon amplifiers, with the latter being more common than the former. Using amplifiers means having to do set-ups, which can be risky because the player is forgoing turns to apply buffs. Nevertheless, the enhanced damage output can allow the player to overwhelm thick armor and damage resistance.
There is the Mental tool, which applies buffs or de-buffs that do not have any damage-inflicting components. These are usually more useful for Leaders, who have Mental ratings that are high enough to make use of the cards that the tool gives.
There is the Scavenge tool. This tool grants cards that are “traps”. “Trap” cards trigger automatically when enemies use melee attack cards. When they are triggered, they have a high chance of interrupting the affected enemy, causing it to lose its attack. There are also cards that act like grenades.
COMBAT – IN GENERAL:
Much of the card-building gameplay and the other gameplay designs feed into the activity of combat. Besides, there is little else of significance in the gameplay.
The player is always afforded the choice of retreating. Issuing the retreat has player characters spending their current turn to escape in the next turn. Provided they are not stunned, they will be able to extricate themselves.
If the player is committed to the fight, then victory can only ever be achieved by the complete annihilation of all enemies. The opposing side will never surrender or retreat.
Slain enemies never come back, unless they have been coded to spawn additional enemies upon their deaths. Some enemies can summon reinforcements too, if the player leaves them alone for a few turns. Newly-arriving enemies always start fresh, so the player will not want to get caught in a battle of attrition against enemies that can call in their pals (or spawn younglings).
INITIATIVE STEP:
Characters with the highest initiative ratings take their turn first, followed by characters with lower ratings and so forth. The player is always shown the order in which characters would move. Their portraits also contain the number of their initiative ratings, though the font can be quite small.
If characters have their initiative ratings tied, the game defaults to the alphabetical order of the first letter of their names, which is not exactly a satisfying tie-breaker. This is not mentioned in the documentation of the game.
Regardless of how much initiative rating that a character has, any character can only make one action in his/her/its own turn.
EVASION:
For better or worse, there is a chance-to-hit system in this game. It is put into effect through the “evasion” statistic. The number for the evasion rating of a target of an attack is subtracted outright from the percentage of probability of hitting that target with an attack card.
The keywords here are “attack cards”. Any other card of offensive nature can be used on them – something that the player might want to keep in mind. In particular, Mental and Medical cards always land on the target, regardless of any evasion rating that they have.
In my playthrough, I have resorted to having a Leader that has specialized into a Psyker but does not have any weapons, just to deal with enemies that have evasion ratings. Incidentally, the Psyker’s damage-inflicting cards also bypass armor and damage resistance.
PROBLEMS IN SELECTING TARGETS:
Most cards require the player to select the target. To do so, the player has to hover the mouse cursor over the sprite of the target.
A long-time player who is experienced with location-sensitive control inputs would notice a problem immediately when trying to do so for the first time. The sprites of characters can overlap each other, This makes the targeting of any sprite that is obscured (even partially) by other sprites to be quite tedious because the player has to hunt for viable spots. The game tries to space them out with an algorithm, but there are times when the algorithm fails, such as putting the sprites of very big characters in the foreground.
The more common and more irritating cases occur when the characters have spirited animations. The Necroguards are particular examples, because they insist on showing off their gangly physiques. This is so because the location-sensitive scripting for the mouse cursor depends on the exact silhouettes of the sprites in real-time.
DISPLAY OF CARD EFFECTS – OR LACK OF IT:
Prior to selecting a target, the player can see text that describes the actual effects of the card on the target, after things like armor and damage resistance have been considered. The chance to hit the target is also shown, if there are things that affect it such as any de-buffs on the player character or any evasion rating that the target has.
In the case of cards that can hit adjacent characters, the player also sees ellipses that show which characters would be affected. There are also multiple textboxes for multiple targets, which can crowd the screen sometimes, especially if the enemy team is packed with more than four members.
Using this display, the player can decide whether to commit to the use of a card or not. The player has all the time to make this decision.
The only exception to this feature is any card that hits the entire enemy team, such as the Tinkerer’s Dirty Bomb. The card is played immediately, so the player is never shown the effects beforehand. The effects of cards that target team members are also not shown, though the cards’ descriptions should already have enough information.
MINIONS:
Minions are additional team members that pre-existing team members can summon into battle. These always appear in front of their summoners. For the purpose of using cards that require targeting, they are considered as separate individuals.
In the case of minions on the player’s team, the player never gets to control them. Rather, they do their own thing. Still, what they can do is actually quite limited, so the player can somewhat predict what they would do.
AREA OF EFFECT & RANKS:
The game has no clear display of the positioning of the characters, but it is there. Pre-existing members of either team are always arranged in a row on either side. (This row goes into the screen, due to the odd isometric perspective.)
The position of each team member is always relative to any other team member that is in the same row; actual apparent distance does not matter. For example, any team member that is next to another is considered to be adjacent to the latter. This is important for the use of cards that hit “adjacent targets”, which have been mentioned earlier.
Minions are always considered to be adjacent to their summoners. However, if their summoners are targeted with such cards, their non-minion team members are targeted instead. Targeting minions with these cards target other minions on the same team as a priority, but if there is no other, their summoners are targeted instead.
FOCUS:
“Focus” is a system that was implemented to hurry fights along, usually in the favour of the player. Whenever a character targets the same enemy character repeatedly with attack cards (and only attack cards), the character gains bonus damage against the latter. This is tracked as a “focus” rating, which is converted into a percentage-based multiplier that is piled on the gross damage inflicted.
A miss on the same target will cancel the multiplier, meaning that targets with evasion ratings are not easy to bring down with focus. Failing to continue to make an attack on that target, for whatever reason, will also cancel the multiplier.
The mechanism of focus works both ways. However, CPU-controlled enemies may not always attack the same target over and over, even if it is prudent for them to do so. On the other hand, this also means that if the player’s team is down to just one person, the player is screwed.
ENEMIES – IN GENERAL:
The enemies that the player would encounter frequently match the player’s team in terms of numbers. In these cases, the player will want to focus on whichever enemy is the greatest threat, especially if it is capable of stripping away shields quickly or it can stun player characters.
In the rare few cases where the player’s team outnumbers the enemy’s, the battle is likely to turn out in their favour. There is not a single enemy that is powerful enough to deal with a tricked-out team, especially if the player has jiggered the team for lock-down or rush-down strategies.
Much later in the game, enemies frequently outnumber the player characters. Coupled with their relatively great strength and diverse capabilities compared to enemies in the early game, such enemy teams can be daunting. Encounters with these teams are moments when the player would find out the hard way whether the player’s card decks for the team have been efficient or not.
(As a general tip, the player might want to have cards that can affect the entire enemy team, especially if these impart de-buffs.)
CANNOT SEE ENEMY DECKS OR TARGET SPECIFIC CARDS IN ENEMY DECKS:
There are enemies that are capable of replenishing their health or their shields; some do so by taking it from the player characters. These enemies may not be challenging; rather, they just drag the fight.
There are enemies that can shut down the player’s team, such as enemies that inflict Fear on the entire team or Stun all of them. These can feel cheap, mainly because there are few reliable means of making the team immune to these shut-down de-buffs. (There is the Medic’s Immunity cards, but these require a lot of set-up when the Medic could be doing something else.)
The most proactive way to deal with such threats would have been to target their troublesome capabilities. In the case of a deck-building game, that would mean disabling their cards.
The player can do this in this game. However, targeting specific cards is impossible; any cards that disable opponents’ cards do so by randomly selecting cards in their decks. The player cannot see the opponents’ decks either, meaning that there are no means of selecting which cards to disable at all.
Most competitive deck-building games do not let players look at their human opponents’ decks for good reasons. However, when the opponents are not human but are instead CPU-controlled enemies that are designed to be beaten anyway, there are no good reasons for not letting the player do so.
EXPLORATION – OVERVIEW:
The derelicts are often large and filled with danger. More importantly, not all explorers are willing to share their knowledge of them, especially their maps. Indeed, the player’s team would have to map the derelicts entirely on their own. There may have been a lost opportunity to implement NPCs that can sell portions of the map of a derelict.
Fortunately, things like the derelicts’ apparent exterior sizes still provide some clue as to how extensive the interior is. Another fortunate certainty is that despite their alien construction, they do not bend the rules of physics, e.g. their interior is as large as their exterior suggests and not any more.
As for the interior of the derelicts, they are represented as a grid of squares. The grid has boundaries that conform to the silhouette of the derelict’s exterior. Each square in turn represents a room. None of the rooms have obstacles that prevent the team from moving into an adjacent room, which is convenient.
However, there is an exception to this. This case of exception involves two rooms, one of which is diagonally adjacent to the other. There is no third room that joins them together contiguously in the cardinal directions. In this case, the player cannot move from one room to the other.
Whichever room that the team is in is considered to have been revealed. A room that has been scanned is also revealed. If there is any unrevealed room that is adjacent to any room that has been revealed, the unrevealed rooms are depicted with smaller squares that have no other visual features. These are there to indicate that there are some rooms left to explore. If there are no small squares next to the squares for already-revealed rooms, there are no further rooms to find.
The player’s team can only ever move across a distance of just one room for any regular move. There is a way to teleport over to the nearest exit instantaneously, but this requires the consumption of a teleportation device. The device can only be used in a powered room or a room with the “energy surge” condition.
Whenever the player’s team makes a move, the other entities on the derelict gets to make their moves too. The player should keep this in mind, because hostile teams will try to move closer to the player’s team.
Each move resumes the passage of time. The player can also have the team wait in place to continue the passage of time. Waiting is useful if there is a hostile team that is pursuing the player’s team and the player’s team is already in an advantageous room. However, waiting still consumes energy.
ENERGY:
The most important resource during the exploration of derelicts is Energy. This is the team’s reserves of power for their suits and life support. Moving around the derelicts costs energy, engaging in combat costs energy (energy is consumed each turn) and using the active scanner (more on this later) costs energy. Removing obstacles also consumes energy. There are interactions with some NPCs and objects that can consume Energy, if the player so chooses to spend it.
Obviously, the player will want to conserve Energy, where possible. Running out of Energy in any derelict would be very bad, and can end in a game-over.
The player might want to go for the energy efficiency upgrades first. The player’s team should be stocked with enough energy cells to last for the run. Whenever convenient, the player will want to consider leaving the derelict shortly after finding a room with an exit; the players team can recharge their reserves at the station later.
The player can also consider gear pieces that grant energy efficiency bonuses. However, there are not many of these gear pieces and they have to compete with other gear that have other useful properties.
Late into the playthrough, energy reserves might become a non-issue. The player characters gain abilities and gear that can help maintain energy reserves, as well as upgrades that eke out more energy from each partial recharge.
PASSIVE SCANNERS:
Passive scanners are not available to a team by default, meaning that they can only ever reveal the room that they are in. This is not ideal, because they cannot see what is ahead of them.
Therefore, it is in the player’s interest to purchase the passive scanner and its upgrades as soon as possible. The passive scanner automatically reveals the rooms in a radius around the player’s team and keeps the reveals as long as the rooms are within range of the player’s team. Obviously, this is useful for spotting incoming threats and figuring out where to move next.
ACTIVE SCAN:
If the passive scan is not enough, there is “active scan”. Active scan is available from the get-go, but it can only be used on squares that have already appeared in the map. Anything around the target square in a radius can be revealed, the extent of which can be increased through upgrades. The extent of its range can be much greater than that of passive scan. However, rooms that have been subjected to an active scan will eventually be obscured after several ticks of time.
In practice, there is generally no need to use the active scan after the player has already fully upgraded the passive scanner. The energy costs for using the active scan can be considerable, and the benefits are not great enough as remuneration for the costs.
HAZARDS:
Space may be a void, but even the entropy of time can ruin space vessels. The derelicts have been abandoned long enough that the neglect has caused them to deteriorate. In addition to gaps in the interior that complicate its exploration, there are rooms that have been afflicted with problems such as radiation leaks or even hull breaches.
Hazards mainly affect combat encounters. Outside of them, they do nothing much to the player’s team because their suits and shields protect them from the hazards as long as they have energy. The only exception is Magnetic Interference, which prevents the use of Active Scans and reduces the range of the Passive Scanner.
It is unclear whether the hazards affect enemies. For one, Low Gravity greatly reduces the damage output of the player characters’ melee attacks. However, it does not seem to affect those of enemies; they still hit hard. Yet, in another example, radiation hazards do appear to prevent enemies from healing themselves or restoring their shields.
Conveniently, there is a consumable that makes the team temporarily immune to the effects of hazards. This can be very convenient for luring enemy teams into afflicted rooms.
DEBRIS:
There are some rooms that have had structural collapses. These rooms are filled with debris, which prevent their exploration and movement through them. The player can remove the debris by spending energy (presumably by having the team spend effort to remove the debris), or using supplies from a salvage kit.
After the debris have been cleared, some loot appears in the room. This is plenty compensation for having spent energy to clear the debris. Moreover, the way is now clear for the player’s team – as well as any roving teams of hostiles.
TRAPS:
No dungeons would ever be dungeons if they lack traps. Since the derelicts are practically dungeons, they have traps too. Presumably, these have been set up by the more intelligent denizens of the derelicts, but even the non-sapient ones would not be affected by the traps.
Anyway, some rooms are rigged with traps. There is no way to know exactly which rooms have traps until the player’s team moves into the room. The team’s scanners can be upgraded to show the proximity of traps, but not their exact locations.
Sometimes, the player has no choice but to risk the trap, because the derelict’s interior has been generated in such a manner that there is a chokepoint that the player must take. The chokepoint so happens to be rigged.
When the team stumbles into a room with a trap, the game makes a check against the highest Tech or Scavenge rating that the team has. How exactly the check is made is not entirely clear, despite the in-game documentation.
Anyway, if the player fails, the trap is triggered. The trap inflicts damage on the player character, usually on their shields first. However, in the case of hull breach or debris fall traps, these damage their health outright, presumably from debris going through their shields anyway.
In addition, hazard zones are created when traps are triggered. The type of hazard depends on the nature of the trap. For example, radiation traps always produce radiation zones.
If the team is lucky enough, someone in the team notices the trap. The player can choose to attempt to disarm the trap, in which case the team member with the highest relevant Skill rating will make an RNG roll. If he/she succeeds, the trap is removed and the team gains some experience points. If he/she flubs, the trap is triggered.
If the team is really unlucky, they not only trigger the trap and get hurt, but the trap rearms itself. It usually does not create a hazard zone in this case, which is a silver lining.
HOSTILE PURSUIT:
Hostile characters are shown as triangles with red backgrounds on the maps of the derelicts. These enemies will detect the player’s team when they come within five squares of them. They will then attempt to go after the player’s team, regardless of whether the player’s team can overpower them or not.
They can be shaken off if they cannot reach the player’s team within several moves. Of course, if the player has to do this, something has gone sour; either the player’s team is badly wrecked or the player is losing interest in the combat gameplay.
CHARACTER LEVEL LIMIT, ABILITY POINTS & RETRAINING:
When player characters gain experience, the experience points are divvied among them equally. When they gain levels, they gain three points to put in their abilities. These should be spent wisely, because the player characters’ abilities are their most powerful assets.
Any player character can only ever achieve ten levels of experience. This might seem limiting, but there are actually not a lot of options for effective character builds. Generally, the player will want to concentrate the player character’s points in their top-tier abilities.
Speaking of which, the player can put the player characters on retraining. This lets the player recoup spent ability points and put them elsewhere. This feature came very late after the launch of the game though.
SPECIALIZATION:
After any player character achieves level 4, the player can decide on a specialization for this character. This decision should be made especially carefully, because it is not reversible.
The player might want to select specializations that build on the basic profession of the player character, if only for the extra power from amplifying their capabilities. The player does not have the choice of using specific cards whenever he/she wants to because of the luck of the draw, so going for versatility can put the player at the mercy of fickle forces. Thus, doubling down is a wise choice.
PARTY COMPOSITION:
The player will have to decide carefully on the composition of the team before the start of the playthrough. Although the player can hire replacement characters, the player cannot have a stable of characters to swap in or out. The player must commit to the members in the team.
Sure, the characters that are available for hire do have character levels that more or less match those of the current members. There is also the matter of the retraining feature, which lets the player rejigger their abilities.
However, the player cannot change their specializations and their personality quirks (which do grant specific bonuses). Most importantly, if the player has seen a potential recruit with capabilities that he/she wants but the player cannot conveniently bring them in for the time being, the recruit cannot be reserved or locked down for consideration later.
“ENVIRONMENTAL” CARDS:
If a team member does not have any useful cards in his/her hand, the player can spend some energy to generate three “environment” cards for him/her to use. Only one can be selected for use; it must be used, lest it is wasted.
These cards are noticeably Tech or Scavenge cards, specifically those that are associated with the Tech or Scavenge Tool cores. The player character’s Tech or Scavenge skill ratings will not improve their potency, however.
DIALOGUE:
In the space station, the only person that the player’s team can talk to in an actual conversation is the station master. There is no one else to talk to, at least until the priced Station Life DLC is installed. This can be unseemly.
Peculiarly, actual conversations can be had during the exploration of the derelicts. They are non-hostile humans aboard some of the derelicts, especially the first several, which are considered safe enough for exploitation.
As to be expected of those who risk their lives to eke out a living on the dangerous derelicts, many of these people are quirky. Some are scientists who are examining the infrastructure on the derelicts. Some are relic hunters.
There are also non-hostile robots and AI’s aboard the derelicts. Whether they were already there or had been introduced by humans are unclear. However, most of them are there for a purpose (just like the hostile ones are there to kill intruders or living organisms). The player can have the team give them a hand to achieve their purpose, or to mess them up if the player so chooses.
In the base game, there are rare few conversations where the player has to make a check against Skill ratings. This is usually the Mental skill rating. In my playthrough, there were only two occasions when a skill check during dialogue is made.
TRADER NPCS:
Some of the NPCs on the derelicts have things to sell. Their offerings are not really any better than those from the pawn shop in the space station, but they do offer a way to offload loot without having to go back to the space station. However, they have a limited amount of money to give, so the player can only offload so much.
There is another problem with some of these NPCs. They are offering items that do not have working code, such as medical kits. This gives the impression that the developers had not been thorough in cleaning up the code of the game.
NEAR-HOSTILE FORCES:
There are some other armed humans aboard the derelicts too. They are either corporate forces that are presumably scouting out a derelict or cultists who are looking for answers to the mysteries of space. Neither group is friendly to stateless salvagers.
They are clearly irritated by the presence of the player’s team, but will not attack because they presume that the player’s team is not worth the trouble. However, the player gets the choice to attack them. This is not a decision to be made lightly though.
Upon having attacked any of them, all of the groups of the same faction in all derelicts become hostile and will actively pursue the player’s team.
The player might be tempted to fight them for experience points and loot, but there are plenty of other sources for these.
VISUAL DESIGNS:
The visual designs of this game had been remarked on by rather unknowledgeable observers as being similar to those of Darkest Dungeons. This is due to the use of odd bodily proportions for everyone (especially their head sizes) and the use of dark shadows. However, the bodily proportions are nowhere near as comical as those in Darkest Dungeon, and the shadows are not as prominent, e.g. portraits still show the eyes of characters.
More importantly, the artists for the game intended to adopt the visuals of 1980s coloured comics. Incidentally, this is the era when the comics world turned to darker and grimmer themes and settings – which is perhaps the inspiration for those in this game.
Whatever the case, the visual designs are mostly serviceable for the purpose of gameplay. There are cases where they are not, such as the aforementioned annoyances with selecting characters for targets.
As for the details of the visual designs, every human is always ever in a powered suit when he/she is in the derelicts. This is perhaps understandable, because their environments are hostile. The only moments when the player could actually see human faces are in the conversations; their character portraits are shown in sizes bigger than the thumbnails in the user interfaces. These portraits would not matter much in the story-telling anyway, because they lack any variety in facial expressions.
Interestingly, there are enemies that look like sci-fi undead. At first, they may seem like cheap takes on the zombie genre. The ending would reveal that they are not exactly undead, and they were never human in the first place either. (The game does depend on an exposition dump at the end to tie up the narrative though.)
Not unlike Darkest Dungeon, this game resorts to still-art that has been given the semblance of motion. This can be seen during combat. The only actual animations are the shaking and wavering that characters make as they stand around in the fights – again, not unlike Darkest Dungeon. At least there is artwork for the deaths of characters, unlike the other game.
SOUND DESIGNS:
There are no voice-overs. There are not even grunts or groans. Any speech is only ever portrayed through text. Perhaps this is just as well, considering the low-budget production of this game. That said, the most that the player would hear are monster noises.
Most of the music is forgettable, especially to players that follow grim-dark sci-fi media. The majority of the tracks have ominous tones, which fit the theme of exploring dark and dangerous places but are otherwise par for the course. One of the tracks that play during combat is at least notable, if only for its starting refrain of rapid electronic vibes.
The only sound designs of significance are the sound effects for the combat and the ambient noises.
MEMORY USAGE & SLOWDOWN ISSUES:
The latest build of the game at this time of writing appears to have a problem with its usage of memory. On my computer, it gobbled over three gigabytes of RAM after a few hours.
Granted, games that depend on 2D artwork like Darkest Dungeon can still gobble around two gigabytes of memory. However, when this game reaches three gigabytes, it remains so and does not lower at all after returning to the main menu; reloading a game save can even increase memory usage further. This is too much.
Worse, after the game reaches three gigabytes, the game’s response to control inputs starts to slow down. Moving from one square to another may require waiting for two seconds or more.
FAILURE TO ENACT CODE:
Perhaps worst of all, when the slowdown begins, the game also starts to skip the running of code. In particular, the code for the abilities and cards that are associated with specialization can fail to run. In my experience with the game, the Tinkerer’s Scrounger ability can fail to trigger at the start of the character’s turn. Another failure is the damage-over-time effect of the Psyker’s Mind Scrambler card not happening.
SUMMARY:
Card Hunter has implemented a deck-building gameplay that utilizes party-based adventuring RPG quite well, while also having other gameplay elements that diversify the gameplay. Deep Sky Derelicts does little more than the basic packaging of cards into gear pieces. Sure, there are inclusions of statistics like initiative and secondary effects, but they only serve to complicate the equipping of player characters.
Everything else in the gameplay such as initiative steps and interrupts is “been there, done that” to a long-time follower of turn-based gameplay. Put simply, they are serviceable but unremarkable. On the other hand, the inclusion of luck of the draw and the usual vagary of chance-to-hit rolls can make this combination seem worse.
Furthermore, the game resorts to cheap methods to escalate the challenge that the game poses, such as having the enemy party outnumber the player’s and increasing the durability of enemies across the board.
Of course, it is possible for the player to come up with decks that can reliably and efficiently crush enemies, such as the Psyker-oriented build that has been mentioned in this article. There is some satisfaction to be had here, but afterwards, there is no reason to deviate from such builds.
There may be some amusement to be had from the artwork, especially for people who had been impressed by how economical Darkest Dungeon was in its aesthetic designs. Yet that also means that Deep Sky Derelicts does not do anything new in the matter of visual designs – something that some people have realized during the Early Access phase of the game’s development.
Moreover, there is the matter of lingering technical issues, such as the aforementioned memory usage, which are still around despite more than a year after the game’s release. When abilities and cards fail to work and the player has to restart the game as a work-around, one’s experience with the game just plummets.
Overall, Deep Sky Derelicts might distract followers of grim-dark sci-fi for a few moments, and people who like deck-building games for a bit longer. Beyond that, it is not worthwhile playing when there are other deck-building games out there.