Deadnaut

So. There's this thing where you have trouble communicating with your troops. Signal interference or something. And they don't really tell you what you can DO about it. And once it starts it only gets worse. So you can't see anything and you can't do anything. I suppose I could go find a YouTube video about it but... If I have to resort to a YouTube video in the first five minutes of a game JUST to continue then the game has already failed.
This has potential but I can not in good conscience recommend it.

...

PS: There is a sequel or spin off game called "Deadnauts: Signal Lost." *Giggle!*

I just discovered Screwfly Studios. I have to say I'm in love with the games that they have made. Great atmosphere. The game leaves a lot to your own imagination in a very positive way. Not a lot of games can do that. Just a great game.

Remember Aliens? Aliens was great! You know the part where Lt. Gorman guides his platoon into the hive and suddenly everything goes to hell and he watches helplessly while their heartbeats flatline one by one?

This game lets you play Gorman, watching helplessly as your hapless deadnauts get in way over their head and die horrible deaths one by one, complete with flatlining health monitors.

At least they're clones, but Weyland-Yuntani would like to remind you that even clones cost money, so please look after the ones you have.

+1, would watch helplessly as my team gets slaughtered again

The bottom line: Get Duskers instead!

I had originally given this game a positive review. But after more hours of play, im sad to see it is completely RNG based (as opposed to skill / wits based), unbalanced, and very poorly implemented.

You have tons of stats like damage & defence types, but almost never the tools (weapons shield types) to exploit them. What you get is 100% RNG based. For example, you face enemies succeptible to say beam weaons, but oops! RNG decided there are no beam weapons available. And this happens most of the time.

You are tasked missions that (again, based on RNG) will probably be IMPOSSIBLE to complete. And i do mean Impossible! Like destroy things that are in a room that is about to collapse, except weapons fire Damages the room! so how do you complete it without blowing up the room? oops! "RNG" dint favor you this time. Start the whole camaign over!

That, plus a TON of UI / QOL "little" annoyances that become unbearable over time. E.g. you cant sort your crew members the way you want (yep, even THAT is RNG). So its impossible to say 1 and 2 are soldiers, 3 is hacker, 4 is shields, etc. Add to that that on every campaign the game assigns different Pictures to your team (you guessed it! RNG!) and its impossible to become acustomed to a team.
And many other "little nuances" like that, wich add up to suck all the fun out of the game.
Get Duskers instead. Its a very similar game, but FAR superior in every way, plus the devs of Duskers DO know how to implement RNG properly on a game.

Compact little sci-fi roguelite tactical RTS with good atmosphere and frustrating controls. It took me this long to complete the 5 different campaigns on extreme difficulty. Not for the easily annoyed. Using left click to deselect as well as primary interaction means it is easy to deselect your unit instead of giving an order. RnG is a little on rails here; for the harder campaigns you really do have to have some luck on the first missions for the shop to randomly sell you specific counter items for specific randomly encountered threats. It is impossible to be even moderately able to cope with every possibility you might encounter.

Points -
+ Good dark sci-fi horror atmosphere leaving much to your imagination
+ Challenging tactical game rewarding different approaches
- Overly annoying user interface
- Very minimal sound effects
- Few annoying glitches
- Campaigns a bit too short and samey

Overall (6 / 10) it's a solid game but only for those who find punishment rewarding. A pity it couldn't have been refined a bit and definitely expanded.

You lead a crew of Deadnauts as they scavenge the wreckage of derelict ships.

PROS
+ Interesting idea
+ Decently built atmosphere

CONS
- Confusing gameplay all around
- Boring
- No tactics
- No music?
- What's the story again?

I loved the idea behind the game. It reminded me of Lt. Gorman from Aliens when the Colonial Marines went into LV-426 to investigate and he was on the dropship watching and directing their movements. Then I was dropped into the game with no tutorial. I took a minute to work my way across the console. Very interesting idea. I like it. There could be a lot of things streamlined, but it adds to the almost steampunk nature of it, in my mind. I think I understand the console well enough. I find out how to breach my first ship.

I work my way across the ship realizing there are no tactics. You just select all your people and move them together... they shoot together... You could take the time to individually move each person, but by the time they all got into position the alien they faced would be dead or gone. There are no tactics. So I continue investigating the ship and collecting data. I figure out how to read ship logs and get some idea of a story. I keep searching. I have no hacker so I can't hack. Don't know what hacking does anyway. I have some defensive player. Don't know what she really does even though I read her gun stats. Battles happen way too fast for me to make use of her anyway. I keep searching. Where's the music? This is getting boring. The graphics are basic, obviously, so there's nothing to really look at. Even reports on the aliens lack any identifying features. No photos. You're fighting orbs. I finish and evacuate the ship.

I find another ship. Repeat everything from ship 1. Hey, one enemy orb shoots rockets or something at you. A new enemy! It looks like the other enemy orb. Oh, somebody died. I can't really read this health gauge properly. I try to move my people to cover or something but it's just a wild west shootout. A couple more die. I decide I don't care. It's either death or the lonely blackness of space with no music. I don't know which is worse. I keep playing for a while. I'm bored with it all. I quit.

That's esentially the game. The negatives could have EASILY been corrected. Add ambient music or radio chatter (chatter comes through in text). It should be a turn based system with cover to add some excitement during battle and allow us time to use our weapons and gadgets, not just a shooter. There needs to be a better explanation of what everything is and why. The messy interface is interesting, but make it logical so people know where to go to find things they are picking up.

I'll be on the Yes & No evaluation on this one, but more on the No side...
The atmosphere is awesome, both graphics and sounds match perfectly with the gloomy mood of the game, and it's really fun to roam from ship to ship, exploring strange and dreadful places where you never really know what will fall upon you. At first. Because there is some replayability, but the patterns and contents are quickly known, even if there is randomness in the different aspects.
Too bad the devs abandonned their game! It can be really great, but in its actual state, it doesn't worth playing more than a few hours. The difficulty is quite hard (even if we can deal with that), it's true that sometimes you start a mission that is impossible to finish due to level randomness, and some bugs remains. It leaves a bad taste of unfinished, and that's a shame because it can go so much further!
I tried several times to asks the devs if there was any plans for the future - as they said there would - but never had answers.
Even for a such basic feature as the custom keybindings, they apparently don't mind to do something! Users of azerty keyboards, be warned! You can't change the controls, and it's really a pain. That's maybe the main reason why i don't play this game anymore. I know they are a small team, but still...
So i'm sorry, but i can't recommand this game until devs consider finishing it.

I thought this would be my kind of game but totally WRONG!

This was just frustrating. I gave it a go, but in the end I achived nothing.

I had 2 or 3 missions my team didn't even get passed the first room!

The first thing I noticed is my team always hated each other, which gives you big penalties. I even tried taking perks so that my guys makes friends easy. but after a few minutes and they hated each other anyway. You'd think a team of professional could put aside their dislikes to survive, but I guess your team is just a group of yahoos with no sense of survival. Because the penalties are heavy.

I played arounf 2 dozen missions and failed horribly each and every sigle one of them. Maybe it's just me who sucks at this game and don't understand the basic of it. But no matter what I tried, I only achieved total and utter defeat. Even with a full team of combat oriented crew I had trouble engaging even a single alien (some of them are easy to engage, but I encountered them sparsely). You need to gather a lot of intel before you start to get a faint idea of how to engage the enemy. By then most of the time most of your team is already dead or dying. Even when it says you can simply engage them your team does poorly, most of the time. One of the rare times I got lucky enough to get aliens life forms my team could actually manage, the room with the log, I needed to retried, was protected with a turret. Which your team has NO WAY to defeat (afaik), unless you hack it (but even that is temporary). But guess what, my only teamate that could hack it managed to die, before I spotted it, so fuck me. This was the only game I even came close to comple the first mission.

After half a dozen failed attempts, I realised I really needed more info about the game so I read the game manual. That didn't help one bit. For example, I read about scanning rooms. So I got a guy with high detecting skill and equiped him with a scanner. But for the life of me, I could not figure out how to scan a room. So it was useless.

Which bring me to another frustrating part of the game... the hacking. Your hacker(s) can only hack what your team visually had contact with. That makes no sense to me. So if there's a turret to hack you need see it and yes the person who's going to need to spot it will more than likely get shot at by it and very likely will die from the encounter (but not always). the one time I managed to hack a turret without anyone dying in the process. I left my hacker on the console in case the nasty thing that reset the ship parameters passed by (because there was no firewall I could set up to avoid that) so the rest of my team could get back.... but my hacker got ambushed by 5 aliens (you know that ones that my whole team have a hard time to handle a single one). So my hacker died horribly and as I predicted it, the turret got reset and the rest of my team was stuck in a room. So much fun!

An other annoying thing is your team is set randomly, and you can't move you guys around. So you can't organize them. For example, you can get your combat crew on the top of the list and your hacker or whatnot arranged a certain way. Since you die all the time you always need to figure out who what and where all the time and it gets annoying. Just that would've made that game super frustrating to simply annoying to me. Also, you need to take the time to equipe them every single time, you can't give them a default equipment build.

All that being said, if you somehow like frustration, swearing and the like... this is the game for you. Otherwise stay away from it.

I still thing the game has potential and is an intresting concept, but I did not enjoy playing it.

The devs obviously sat down and watched that one scene in Aliens and said "Let's make a game about that." You're Lieutenant William Gorman!

Taken directly in that context, this game succeeds quite well atmospherically. The console is chunky lo-fi-sci-fi and the viewscreen reminds of the installation map they looked at in the movie. This is a nice way for an indie developer to get away with less compelling graphics in the viewscreen. The game continually reminds you that you're not personally with the squad. Your video, audio, data connections fluctuate and commands sometimes aren't heard.

The gameplay is quite good in that you have a small squad of highly specialized guys (you can customize them a bunch) and you have to micromanage them carefully to succeed. The game is very challenging but I find I've usually lost due to a moment of carelessness, in classic roguelike fashion.

Excellent replayability. I've won, I've lost many times, and I'm still playing it and having new experiences each time. It's enjoyable to fail, tweak your squad members, and try again.

The flavor text generation is a nice touch. The ship logs, the overarching story, the alien descriptions, the enemy characteristics, and the lengthy descriptions for all of the above, are quite well done. Though much of it doesn't really matter from a gameplay perspective I still enjoy reading about it.

The enemies are different each game, sometimes quite substantially. It might be ice zombies, ethereal specters, leaping hordes, etc. Between each of the 4 ships in the campaign, you have a chance to buy equipment. Your purchasing decisions are based largely on how well you have investigated the ships, and how much you have learned about the enemy's strengths and weaknesses. Reading the logs is really quite important, and making decisions based on them will make or break your campaign.

Recommended!

This is only a first look review after about four hours playtime. I might update it at some point.

All in all a great roguelike game. Great atmosphere, superb sound design, fitting (if somewhat minimalistic) graphics, creepy enemies and lots of equipment to research and outfit your Deadnauts with. The game does a great job making you feel like a remote mission planner.. you feel very distant and disconnected from the life and death struggle of your Deadnauts on a strange alien ship. Yet, at the same time, you become more and more attached to these sensor blips on your screen after each (usually harrowing) mission.

But there are also a few things I find lacking. While I do like the challenging difficulty, the game just sometimes grabs you by the b***s and doesn't let go until you're dead. And that can happen in the very first mission, which makes this game rather frustrating for newcomers. If you can't handle RNG and missions going from everything is dandy straight to hell in a matter of seconds, you should stay away from this game. But that goes for any roguelike, really.

Another complaint I have, is that you can't seem to hire new Deadnauts during a campaign. You can only clone your existing five Deadnauts.. which makes playing the game with randomly generated characters completely unappealing, because you can just create five very good minmaxed Deadnauts since you're stuck with the same guys for the entirety of a campagin anyway. Which makes the game's claim that Deadnauts are expendable (says so in the intro) untrue.

Another thing I found annoying is that you can't abort a mission. You have to complete the objective, before you can evacuate your Deadnauts from the alien ship.. why? It would be cooler, if you could abandon missions, xcom style. Also, the mission objectives themselves seem to be lacking in variety. In about four hours of playtime and probably 10 - 15 missions I only ever had two objectives: to either find the ship's log or to destroy mysterious artifacts. But maybe I have been only unlucky sofar, since the missions are randomly generated. And the missions themselves (layouts) have been fairly varied.

It would also be nice, if the game would allow you to carry over researched equipment from one campaign to another. Starting at zero every single time you start a new campaign can become quite tiresome.

Despite those flaws (well, they are flaws only in my opinion ofc.) I still think this is a great atmospheric and in style unique game which deserves a closer look. There is a demo available on Screwflie's Deadnaut page, as far as I am aware.

In it's current state, I would give this game an HONEST 7/10 (honest as in 5 is average and everything above that is good). A great, but not perfect, game!

UPDATE: It took me about 7.5 hours to complete my first campaign (including character creation, so actual playtime was probably closer to seven hours). Sooner than I expected.. but then again, the game does offer high replay value. Mission objectives have become more varied since I started over, so that's good.

But I did notice another annoying thing: you perform actions by clicking on ingame popup texts (such as investigate, hack, etc...). The problem is that your Deadnauts can sometimes only interact with those, if you rotate your camera to a different angle.. which can be really infuriating in situations where every second counts. Luckily this bug happened only infrequently. I can still recommend this game to roguelike fans who don't mind the other stuff I have listed.

Let it never be said that I didn't at least try. I have played this game for about 3 hours, and it's been teeth-grindingly frustrating. I am being completely honest when I say I have absolutely never felt this level of animosity towards a game. Here are the biggest problems I can list, if and following that I will lay out in more detail my frustrations to anybody who wants to read that far.
1: Totally random. It's entirely possible to gear up your team and send them into a 100% impossible mission
2: Even when you know what you're doing, impossible scenarios will be thrown at you
3: No mod support. Don't like a feature? Too bad. You're stuck with it. (Devs have said it will come with enough player demand, but I doubt it very seriously just from their phrasing about the work it would take)
4: Some of the character flaws can make a character impossible to use. In an already ball-busting difficulty curve, do we really need that?
5: While in pressured suits, you can die of vacuum exposure. Excuse me?
6: Sentinels. Big evil guns that kill in one hit, can only be hacked once you've seen them, and tend to sit out in the open where you won't see them by any means until it's far too late.
7: You will be SEVERELY outnumbered and there's a good chance you'll find yourself swarmed by a very large group of armed to the teeth aliens
8: You'll unlock new weapons before you have armor capable of supporting it. Hope you didn't waste your currency on it too early.
9: Some of the contextual actions have to be activated from a certain camera angle, or else the menu will disappear.
10: Replacing squad members is too expensive for this kind of game.

So right there we have 10 good reasons to dodge this one. The concept kicks butt, no denying. I LOVE the atmosphere. I love the isolation. You, as the character, are the pilot of some nondescrepit kind of 1980s tech powered spaceship, and you control all the action through a series of 3 screens and a viewport. I have really felt the pangs of loneliness just staring at these screens, and overall Screwfly did a fantastic job of setting the backdrop and stage for their game. Truly fantastic. However, the gameplay leaves a lot to be desired, just like Zafehouse Diaries. I hate that game, simply because it's impossible. Every little thing you do will end in disaster constantly because the gameplay is half-baked and poorly implemented. But we're not discussing that here, we're talking about the poor gameplay in ANOTHER game by the same developer. First up is the gearing. You may either create your own characters, or roll the dice. There are 4 classes, as follows:
Combat (carries weapons as primary)
Tech (Carries hacking gear as primary)
Field (Carries shield projectors as primary)
Sensor (Carries sensor pingers as primary)
All of these have a place in the squad except for Field. Because of the limitations of the armor, if you only have one field unit, you have to play favorites with your soldiers. Sure, you only need to extract 1 Deadnaut from the ship to be successful, but at a whopping 3,000Kn to revive the dead, it's pretty much a death sentence to do that. Now then, for the first 2 1/2 hours, I died in the first ship. Every time. I'd get somewhere close, and then I'd die. But this last mission is what did me in. I went into it as carefully as I could. I got lucky: Melee only enemies in a tight ship with decent integrity. That's the best setup you can get. I even caught the Sentinel on board and was able to disable it safely. But it all broke down as I was pulling the log. Would you know, the gen engine decided to place a teleporter on the bridge. I have 2 options: Either destroy it and safely extract the data, or let it be and face a steady stream of enemies until I can get away. I chose to destroy it, and for some reason that vented the bridge. Now here's where it got fun. Noticing that all of my characters were dying from vacuum (which above... Pressure suits. Explain this immediately.), I instructed them to grab the log and run back out the door. The door is now locked thanks to Watchers, which patrol the ship and look for ways to cause you BIG problems. Either way, the instructions were ignored. All of my signal bars were full, and I should've been able to get out fine, but nope. Nobody was taking orders at all. It wasn't until the first person suffocated that everybody else got in gear, grabbed the log, and another died before the door opened. So even in the most optimistic scenario, I lost 2/5 because of 'random' factors. I feel the need to say that I don't oppose the idea of rougelike games. I enjoy them from time to time. But when I encounter a game that I can sink 3 hours into and STILL not beat the first level, well I consider that to be a failure on the part of the developer. Do not buy this game if you enjoy your sanity. If it's the atmosphere you want, go buy Elegy for a Dead World. Much the same feeling of isolation and lonelyness, much less wanting to put an axe in your computer.

I can see Deadnaut becoming one of my favourite games. According to the creepy gameplay watcher, I've played 4 1/2 hours so far, and that sounds about right. A full campaign lasts around an hour to an hour and a half, maybe two if you like to take it slow. I just finished my first successful campaign; all others failed on the first ship... within about 5 minutes of breaching the airlock.

So what is Deadnaut? Basically, it's Space Crusade, except, instead of 7 foot killing machines in power armour, your squad bears a greater resemblance to the crew of the Serenity, or maybe Red Dwarf, depending on the characters you end up with; they're pretty good at what they do, even impressive at times, but they're hardly intimidating. You sit back on the mothership and command your squad through the interfaces that you can see in the screenshots up at the top of this page, pointing out which terminals you want hacked, which doors you want opened, and which -OH HELL WHAT IS THA-JUST SHOOT! KILL IT!!!!- and which centuries-old corpses you want rummaged as you go about completing your objectives. Meanwhile, your crew are chattering away amongst themselves about their stim habits, love of blood-soaked gore rooms, and what kind of card the techie wants for their birthday.
Do a good job, and next time you'll have the opportunity to die a meaningless death a million light years from home with some slightly swankier gear. Pretty cool, huh?

I only have one complaint about the game, apart from my wails of dismay when my entire team is, yet again, suffocated or torn to shreds by indescribable horrors – within the campaign, you unlock new equipment for your crew... none of that carries over between campaigns. Personally, I'd prefer a persistent meta campaign between the campaigns; develop the crew over a series of missions, replace the losses, say goodbye to the retirees and wish luck to those get attention from the powers back on Earth. I think that would add even greater depth to an already brilliant game, but it is what it is, and what it is is brilliant.

In my opinion, it's easily a 9/10. (Add that meta campaign in, devs, and I'll give it a 10! :D)

While this is a game with a lot of hidden depth, I'm reviewing it to counter a lot of the reviews saying "The game isn't hard, just give all your guys guns and stick together: walk thru campaign in 2 hrs". Sure, I have done that. And also I have had the exact same squad ripped apart in the first room they found. The enemies are random. Against some, run and gun may infact work. More often than not, you wont make it out of the gate. A very spooky game, part strategy, part jump scare, part warning against the dangers of cloning :D

Deadnauts has some interesting concepts that I haven't seen before.
But I see a lot of unused potential in the hacking.
As example there are "Watchers" who can make your sreen blurry, or unable to control your Deadnauts.
But they're just a "wait a sec to fix it" problem.
On the other side the "Threat"s, the enemy aliens are very good designed.
The strenghts and weaknesses are as random as the attack patterns.
On your first playthrough you may've problems with enemys that lunge you, but later you discover how
to protect you and fight against them.
The menus are intelligently integrated into your view, and you can view them
easily without pausing the game, or destroying the atmosphere.

Your "squad" is highly customizable, with "only some" basic slots,
wich have to be used efficient by assigning every member of your squad a
role to support the others, or fight the enemies.

I would recommend this game to everyone, who has
fun with different enemy types, a highly customizable
squad and the minimalistic graphic, witch perfectly fits
to the game inn my opinion.

If you enjoy strategy games that pose varying levels of difficulty (if sentinels are involved then it gets a lot tougher) then this may be a game for you. Personally, the custom character creation is my favourite part of game. Then comes the fact that every level you encounter has a COMPLETELY different layout, unknowing of what may lay behind every door and if the decision to open a door or blast open a door may:

1. Get your Deadnaut 'decapitated' by a sentinel.
2. Get your Deadnaut dragged away and torn to ribbons.
3. Become susceptible to a horde of enemies.

. . . and etc. One of the greatest elements this game poses is the feeling of unknowing what lies behind every door, or what may be in the very room your deadnauts are searching. It can feel like no one is ever safe and pulls it off very well.

"How many drops is this for you Lieutenant?"

"38... simulated"

"How many *combat* drops?"

"Uuuuhh, two... including this one"

That's my thoughts on it so far after my first two games folks: You're pretty much Gorman running the show, except this time you're hanging out in Operations while you send 5 marines (and the tech guys lack weapons) into the Nostromo...

A Nostromo that's infested with Alien Queens and rogue AIs and hostile gun turrets.

This here's a hard game, and I love it it bits. Highly recommended for those who like a tactical challenge where things can (make that WILL) go wrong; being able to adapt accordingly to surprises is the name of the game. If you can't, you will learn to do so :)

Always remember: Your plan will not survive contact with the enemy :D

*** UPDATED : After putting a little more time in the game I've fleshed out the review to paint a better picture of the game. Don't be put off by the real-time aspect of the game, your Deadnauts aren't idiots and will automatically fire at any hostiles they detect. ***

Searching derelict ships from ancient civilizations in deep space is pretty much as deadly as it sounds, however, a well balanced party with the appropriate equipment can brave the dangers and emerge relatively unscathed. While your first few attempts might result in you getting your party horribly maimed, a little attentiveness and situational awareness will go a long way and allow you to play an entire game with no casualties. Make your own party and name them after friends and family, and if they die, no worries! You can clone them! Just don't get too attached to the clone...

There will be incredibly tense moments in game that are not arbitrarily forced on you via a streamlined story and can't be replicated every game you play. Each ship has it's own challenges and enemies that can potentially shorten your life span. Since enemies, loot, and ship layout changes with each new campaign, there is no reliable way to game the meta and ensure victory each play through.

Between traditional zombie-like space enemies that want to disembowel you, giant Sentinels (laser turrets!) that can gun down your entire party in a matter of seconds, and artifical intelligence programs known as Watchers that are essentially cyber ninjas patrolling the ship's network you have your work cut out for you. Running around guns blazing might work in one campaign and get you killed within five minutes in another.

Imagine the following scenario : Your hearty crew breach a new room and as they cautiously advance are suddenly swarmed on nearly all sides by almost a dozen enemies. Fear sets in and bullets fly in every direction, your non-combat oriented Deadnauts not having the best accuracy under the pressure. Inadvertently, the stray rounds bounced around the room far more than recommended and comprimised the structural integrity of the room you're in. Life support fails and your crew is mercilessly exposed to the vacuum of space. You quickly dart towards the door you just entered from, when unexpectedly, your video feed dies, you can't issue orders to your men because your audio feed has been cut, and the door they're attempting to reach has been sealed. Congratulations, a roaming Watcher just ruined your day because you forgot to install a firewall earlier to counter it.

The watcher can't maintain the jam for a long period of time, and your audio/visual feed comes back just in time for you to realize the majority of your party is at half life from standing in the destroyed section of the ship. Your Deadnaut hacker hauls ass to the door, opens it, and everyone throws themselves into the safety of the adjoining room. Or maybe everyone dies horribly because your hacker got dragged off and flayed earlier. Unfortunately, it takes 15 seconds to open the sealed door and everybody dies in the mean time.

That is just a sample of the fun you can expect!

As far as party composition goes, your crew of five's roles are determined by the type of suit they're wearing, as it will allocate different slots for equipment in weapons, tech, sensors, or protection. When you complete missions, find blueprints on the ships you're searching, or purchase new ones on the marketplace afterwards, you might have a suit with slots for weapons and tech. This changes each game, however, and the slots each type of suit has is different every time.

But just because there is no class system in Deadnaut's does not mean you're going to assign a dumb grunt the role as the group's techie responsible for deactivating turrets or installing firewalls to keep Watchers off your back. Characters have four stats that correspond with eight abilities, and where an interesting aspect of the game comes into play is character creation. You can customize your roster of Deadnaut's to fulfill specific roles.

These aren't going to be Master Chief's with flawless personalities and sparkly clean criminal records, since only the desperate or deranged would seek what usually amounts to a one way trip into deep space aboard alien derelict ships. If you want a character with extra stats to allocate you're going to have to decide if you want to assign them extra flaws, such as taking stims without being ordered or maybe they periodically steal money from the group. Is that trade off worth the extra firepower?

At the end of the day this game offers a lot for $10 and while I probably won't be investing 100s of hours into it, I've enjoyed the short time I've spent and will log more later. For me it scratches an itch and even reminds me a bit of Firefly, in the way that you have a motley crew, all with different motivations, just trying to make ends meat in the darkest corners of the galaxy.


Pros :

- A unique game that pulls no punches, you're punished for your mistakes and rewarded for careful planning and positioning.

- The game changes with each campaign, one might have you searching medical ships discovering what went wrong, while others will have you salvaging military warships with active turrets around every corner.

- Good amount of character customization, I was able to reconstruct my family with pretty accurate detail (or, what our futuristic Deadnaut alter egos would be). Each Deadnaut had their place in my party and if one of them died it made the mission harder.

- Intense atmosphere, the sound is well done and when alarms start going off, you start to panic.


Cons:

- Even after reading the manual it still took trial and error in game to figure out what was happening and how to use abilities in game. It didn't take very long, but it could be a potential source of frustration.

- While the atmosphere is pretty interesting, the crew logs aren't particularly intense and are repetitive. Once you've read the log of one ship, you've pretty much read them all.

- Replayability might be questionable for some people. My first successful campaign completion took 2 hours, and my second one took barely 66 minutes. That doesn't mean I'm done with the game, however, as each campaign has individual challenges and I've only succeeded on about 2 out of 9 attempts. Others might finish one campaign and be done though.

- Confusing relationship mechanics. I couldn't tell why one of my characters with high cohesion (the charisma stat) was hated by everyone else. Sometimes your characters mesh really well together, and other times they start fighting within minutes of a new campaign, even with the likeable trait.


TL;DR = Even if the game doesn't receive substantial updates, this is a game worth trying if you're into strategy games or rogue likes/lites. Or dying surrounded by friends and family on an alien ship in deep space sounds really fun.

Tense and very difficult, this isn't a game for everybody. Your interface is very faliable, and at times comes under direct attack. You will lose your visual display, your communications will be cut preventing you from issuing orders, your troops may panic, or go space crazy at times. If you can't stand games that use the interface as a difficulty mechanic and occasionally remove control from your hands, this isn't going to be your game.

Having said that you will not be getting your hands dirty in this game. Instead you get a chance to be one of those guys that sits in a comfy chair back on the ship, watching the commando team as it breaches the spooky alien vessel through a glowing CRT, sipping a fine scotch whiskey as the whole mission goes pear-shapped and everybody gets killed. Don't worry, you can always hire another crew. The important thing is that you didn't even need to wear pants for this operation.

In one campaign your fighting off waves of fast moving xenomorphs, through the flurry of fast moving xeno's you see one of your men get dragged away through a airlock. Yet in another campaign you may be contending with the possessed remains of a former crew driven insane by unknown artifacts, behemoths throwing your soldiers around as artifacts obscure your command and control with horrifying visions of death and torture.

Deadnaut's is a game that wants to immerse you in its universe. Your hud looks akin to something from a WW2 submarine simulation and your control over your soldiers is sketchy at the best of times. There are a large amount of things to take into consideration with Deadnaut's and many ways for those under your command to come to harm or die, this may be the one area the game faulters in. It is a real time tactical squad based game, essentially a rogue like.

So what do you do? You command five "deadnauts" as you scour decaying alien ships from a long gone era. Your objective is typically to figure out what happend to the crew, learn more about this civilization and clear out any hostile remnants, examining the dead crew and reading their logs. Your characters are divided into four seperate roles, a Assaulter, Shielder, Hacker and Scanner. Assaulters carry the big guns and are more hardy, however too much firepower could result in you destroying a section of the ship if not outright blowing up the ship. Shielders can project a powerful shield onto your deadnaut's, as well as allow your men to move through area's of the ship with no air, however they lack on offensive firepower being forced to only use pistols or knives. Hackers can hack into the ships systems, open locked doors, establish firewalls and alter the ships power levels, creating two whole levels of combat between the ship's anti-virus systems and its "crew". Finally the Scanner can scan areas of the ship to locate hidden enemies and for you to plan out your attack.

Your charactes can be customised fully, and have unique, and random, backgrounds and relationships. You may get one crew who are all on good terms with one another, or one that is divided into two groups and hates the other. Character creation is in depth with you assigning points to areas to boost their statistics, you can get more points by applying negative traits to your character.

The ship itself is dying and decaying, parts of the ship may have no lifesupport and its defence systems are in a varying state of readness. The ship itself has several ways of defending itself. Doors are its first line of defence, simply closing them or keeping them locked can slow you down, the second level of defence are Watcher's, moving programs that will attempt to undo any hacks you've made, so closing doors you've opened for example. The final level of defence are sentinal turrets, extreamly lethal but they can be hacked to your side, until a Watcher reverts the hack.

The actual enemies themselves also vary, as you would expect from a roguelike. Fast moving aliens, zombified crewmembers, etheral ghosts, plague carriers and much more. Each enemie type has to be respected and observerd to determin their weaknesses. Some may die from a single bullet from a ballistic firearm, others may be impervious to bullets but not to lasers. Some might be hidden to your sight but your scanners can pick them out easily, they may move through walls or drag your men away from you. There are many combinations that will keep you on your toes.

However, for all the good I can talk about this game, it does have downsides, like any game good or bad.

Death can be quick and sudden, and the difficulty can vary from easy to impossible at times. You may enter a room only to see all your men drop dead instantly. The game is also glitchy, some time's you may not be able to select something to examine in game, or log entries will be jumbled or unselectable. Losing control of your soldiers can also be frustrating, having your men decided to run away and get killed because of a misclick or some wierd personality trait that caues them to ignore your orders.

There is also no real in game tutorial, just some one off tool tips. There is a manual that you can read (and I highly recommend you do) but even that can be hit and miss.

The game is also heavily RNG dependant. You may never recieve the tools on the market, meaning if the enemies are vulnerable to Beam Cold weapons, yet you may never be able to buy a Beam Cold weapon. Also you may never recieve vital equipment like uprgraded suits.

However, at 10$ this is a solid game that is very immersing. There is a lot to do and see, a wide range of tactics to apply and a lot of replayability. It can be frustrating but at the same time your skill can surmount many obsticals.

I only wish the game had more to do, such as a XCOM style game of sending out Deadnaut's to difference areas in space to explore and more of a metagame. Or even just a way to carry over a team from one campaign to another. Nonetheless, this game is fun.

Intro
You are the captain of greath intersteller salavage ship
Your mission will be diffrent eachtime often suicidel
Your enamies wont be easy nor the same
Your crew will be a bunch of hero's or a bunch of fools
However

Your willing to give it all inorder to become a rich legend


Gameplay
The first thing that stands out in the game would be the Ship Command panal ( Interface)
This really give's you the feeling you are in charge of a old salvage ship and you have
to managed your missions & crew & database.

Durning missions you will face random problems like radios malfunctions to interfance storms
ussualy if the captain ( player) deals with them cool headed, he will be able to solve most
upcoming problems, however sometime's one small ship malufction could lead to the dead of your team

This will make the game more tenste & interesting ontop of that you will allso have to deal with
the aliens, you will come across diffrent kinds and each of them is diffrent some are weak against bullets
while others are slow.. However sometime's you will come across a really deathly kind and for those
you might want to try to counter becauce if you dont. . . it might cost you a couple of crew members


Storyline
The storyline is simple you are a captain of a salavage team who's going to salavege xenos vessels
Eachtime the game will generate random background story

the game is mostly build around the idea that you will have your own storys to tell however
i feel the game is build too mutch around this and the fact there's no voice storyteller in the game
Just saddens me

Technical
The game is fairly well programmed, I dont have problems regarding frame drops and i havent encounteted game
Breaking bug

You only need a decent Ram card for the rest a simple CPU & Video card will do fine


Mechancis
There are allot of random generator mechanics build into the game.
For example there is a R.G for encounters / Missions / Enamies / loot / Crew / lore

One partically interesting Random generator mechanic would be the one
that they have build for the aliens, you will never come acorss the same kind alien
in another campaign offering a refreshing & interesting expirance eachtime

i have Allso noticed there's a deep charater creation mode where inn you can
add new possible Crew members for your salvage missions, The CC mode is
well build and give you the option to give a crew memeber a real background

However there are mechanics that need inprovement like combat & Ingame Acitions
they are fairly limited, Allso the loot mechanics needs inprovement
the game simply lacks interesting loot


Sound
The music & aliens & Background sounds are really well done, it slightly reminds me of watching one of those old 80 sci-fi horror movie aside from that what's allso interesting that sound plays a role in the game for example it help you reconise what kind of enammies are behind a certain doors


Overview
Gameplay 8/10
Storyline 6/10
Technical 10/10
Mechancis 6/10
Sound 9/10

Finnal
Even though the game lacks certain game mechanics & Feature's this game caught my attention
It's fun & refreshing it's worth the money and im looking forward to the upcoming content

p.s this game it's hard & unforgiving :,) be prepared for the horrors in space

Pros
Complete control over your crew customization
Well thought out game mechanics
Easy to use controls
Fun to play
Haven't run into any bugs(Yet)

Cons
No tutorial
Frustrating

Deadnaut, is really not an accurate name for this game as more often then not im dead again. Luckly for me i can be a glutton for punishment which this game has in spades.

Im mainly going to address my con list here as i feel like although the game has cons they are also part of the gameplay.

No tutorial is a con simply because there is so much to understand and if you just go straight to new game you'll just die instantly with no idea why. Such as what each part of your UI does, took me three campaigns before i figured out where to see what an enemies health was, and i still dont know how to see the HP of my own crew members.

Frustrating is certianly gonna happen, mostly at the start of the game because as mentioned before there is a small amount of information given to you

Over all though it is a game i would recomend because although it is hard to understand and frustrating at times. It has the great quality of being able to make you want to play it one more time because this time you know how to do it better.

Early impressions with edits and later to a full review once I get more playing time in.

Okay, rogue likes, rogue lites, rogue whatevers have made not only a comback but have crept into the mainstream; these aren't just for the hardcore nerdist anymore. Deadnaut is one of the most atmospheric games in any genre I have played ever. Period. [I've been a gamer since the Amiga, Atari St, and C64 days].

Deadnaut has a gritty aesthetic, this isn't Star Trek with everything looking shiny and somewhat sterile. In fact, Deadnaut feels more "primitive" than being aboard the Nostromo. It sort of looks like the interior of a World War II sub yanked into the future. It feels somewhat claustrophobic and that adds to the tension. Moreover, your sensors aren't exactly Star Trek issue either. As you monitor your squad to their impending doom, the viewscreen - or port to be more accurate - will sometimes experience staic due to radiation levels. As in Alien, squad life signs are monitored and that too is rather panic inducing as you try to get your squad out of harm's way - and there is a LOT of harm lurking in these derelict ships you are exploring.

Character creation is deep. You have points to spend on each phase of each crewperson's stats. But, Deadnaut goes beyond mere D&D type stas. You are creating a sort of skeletal bio of each member. Their education earlier in "lie" directly impacts their performance on missions and even more interestingly it impacts how each individual squad member interacts with the rest of the squad. Yiu get a sense that these are truly mercenary type space scavengers and there is no noble quest to fulfill.

The action is in real time though the pace is not frantic. The sensor representation of the derelicts and your crew are somewhat abstract but rather than that being a distraction, it actually adds to the atmosphere of this gem out of nowhere.

I have played as of this writing only 21 mintes or so. All but one of my squad died and we are talking perma-death here. That said, the game is not unfair as many rogue type games can be. I suppose I would call this a successful (so far) marriage of RTS, RPG, and Rogue like.

It's fun, dark, grimy, and weird - like my girlfriend but without the Satanic tattoos.

See you out there sister and brother Deadnauts!!