WarpVector Reviews

A fun Rougelike. Needs work and theres a lot that could be done and the music is boring and repetitive. But hey! Its worth it! RATING 5/10

The currency in this game is called BitCredits and it's a cryptocurrency (in-universe, not a real one). I guess crypto stuck around, huh? Other than that, good game lol

I"m trying to save the home planet from its dying star but wind up triggering a nearby anomaly field that collapses into a black hole and eats said star... [spoiler] and home planet.... whoops [/spoiler]

Took me 7 hours of playtime, and I finally beat it and feel extremely satisfied for the money and time spent. Movement uses Newtonian physics, which is quite realistic but takes some getting used to, cause you have to mentally plan out your changing trajetory and deceleration and have to line up velocity vectors when trying to dock. Oh, and [spoiler]do not sell the Orbitron Device, because you need to deliver it to the starting system's terrestrial planet. If you sell it for 1000 gold, then you have to buy it back for 2000 gold, which I managed to do in the nick of time. The victory screen is also a little underwhelming, but you have to internally feel the accomplishment.[/spoiler] Here are my stats: Returned the Orbitron to Altaris on day 1830 out of 2000. Pirate ships destroyed: 19 Khanate ships destroyed: 8 Systems discovered: 22

An absolutely awful control scheme undermines this game. Basically it is a turn based vaguely Newtonian (i.e. we have acceleration/inertia) system where you plot a course via the cursor keys. In practice it means you spend a lot of time flying in circles to reach anywhere, which I found very tedious. Also in combat, why can't my ship turn in place while on a vector and fire in whatever direction like actual Newtonian physics allows? I imagine I could get used to it but can I be bothered? Not as this time. I wanted to explore planets and anomalies, not fly in circles for a lot of the time while I struggle to reach them. That said it was mildly funny when I visited an anomaly five minutes after starting my first game, hit an ion storm that drained all my energy so I could not maneuver, and then fell into a sun because my momentum carried me in a straight line into it. I tried a couple more goes but it hasn't grabbed me as I hate the steering. I'll maybe try again later but it's a no for now.

It takes a little while to get used to the "Newtonian" movement, and it takes a little longer to get used to the power management and realize why sometimes you can't move or your shields aren't charging or whatever. Some more tooltips or UI alerts would help with that. But, once you get used to it, it is really great. I managed to die crashing into my home planet, die to pirates, die being launched into the sun by an anomaly, completely disarm my ship for a pacifist speed run, and die to a precursor fleet on the far side of the galaxy. I also sucked my entire home system into a black hole by mistake, so +1 for that but I'm subtracting half a star in my review because that didn't count as a victory for stopping the supernova. Anyway, 11/10, great traditional roguelike game with some really neat innovations. Simple and fast to play, can die on your coffee break.

Good, simple game well worth it's price with an interesting story and good combat. Could use some polish but real enjoyable even just as is

It's an interesting project that's for sure. I love the idea. ASCII space exploration roguelike ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm going to give it a very tentative thumbs up because it's obviously a labor of love and it's still very new (this review is version 1.1) so there's the chance of some substantial updates to come, but that thumbs up comes with some reservations, which you should read because this game is definitely not for the faint of heart. It's cheap, and it's interesting, and it's worth it to me, but I think a lot of people will struggle with the issues below even more than I am. First of all, the game provides little to no guidance or hand-holding. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in combination with some of the rest of the comments I'm going to make, it becomes a major problem. All you get is a simple help screen that tells you the controls (neither rebindable nor remotely ergonomic, using arrow keys instead of wasd, only a bare handful of controls sprinkled randomly across the keyboard) and an ominous threat that you should try not smashing into planets when landing on them. Which ironically turns out to actually be impossible, even if the game did explain how to, which it doesn't, figure it out yourself, gamer. Also when it says 1000 days what it really means is 1000 turns, that's your limit. Each ship movement or change in velocity counts as a turn, so turns start to rack up really quickly. I'm not a big fan of time limited games and wish there was an option to turn that off, the game is already challenging enough for me without the additional time pressure. The "tough it out, princess" attitude extends to the RNG which is absolutely punishing and unforgiving. The game has zero remorse at having an anomaly throwing you next to a hostile starbase and three battleships that will instantly annihilate you. This is not a freak occurrence, this is a regular feature of this game's style of RNG. It hates you and wants you to die. It will give up rewards only grudgingly and at risk of great peril. It does not care about you and it is only a matter of time before it stabs you in the back. This wouldn't be so bad if you could at least somehow analyze and weigh the risks of various actions and consider different actions, but there doesn't seem to be any tools to even try to do that. There's no scanner to get information about an object or anomaly, and even if you could do that, typically the only actions you have available are weapons and a communication transmitter that seems nearly useless, any ship I've found to communicate with either wants money that I don't have to be hired as an escort (rare), or ignores all attempts at communication and tries to kill me (like 90% of the time). You start the game with almost no useful options and the only way to start to gain access to more options is through luck. And remember, the RNG hates you. You cannot leave the starter system (which may be a murderous system full of pirates) until you've taken enough risks to get rewarded with coordinates to a new system you can jump to or randomly been thrown into one. The new system is probably also going to try to kill you, and may just instantly kill you the moment you arrive, so it's not really much of an improvement, but once again, sometimes you get lucky. The RNG still hates you. Landing on planets is impossible without damaging your ship, and the only results I've had from attempting to do so range from nothingburger "you don't find anything" to "oops you tripped an alarm and an enemy ship is now on its way" to the most interactive event I found which is "oh no one of your crew is being eaten by monsters, would you like to leave him to die or send 10 additional crew to also be eaten by monsters?" When it happens at an appropriate time, the ship-to-ship combat itself, like other reviews mentioned, is quite neat and due to the maneuvering and firing arcs can be surprisingly tactical, at least until you get brutalized by the RNG (you will, it's inevitable). You do start with a decent slate of weaponry, it turns out, although the game never really explains enough for you to be able to appreciate that. Almost everyone in this universe seems to hate you, much like the RNG. The UI is generally clunky and inscrutable. Faint question marks in the background of stars seem to be anomalies, so look out for those. Unlike something like Dwarf Fortress, where if multiple ASCII icons occupy the same tile, it will flash between them, here things like the arrow pointing where your ship is going will completely obscure whatever's in that tile, so it can be hard to see and understand if you're going to collide with something or not. And randomly for some screens you have to use the mouse, there are no keyboard controls, it's all a bit jarring, it's workable once you figure it out but it's not ideal. I will add some more details if either patches come out to address any of these things or if the savage RNG ever allows me to get further into the game. It's worth the price, but only if you're willing to tolerate some of the above frustrations.

WarpVector is ... an odd duck. Pros: + Classy retro graphics, imitating text mode games of decades gone by. + A unique turn-based movement system, capturing the tricky nature of maneuvering without air or water resistance to slow your momentum. + Quick, play-and-go runs that only take a few minutes even when going well. Cons: - Very, very random. Pop an anomaly, appear in a random system with no warp power in range of a pirate space station's siege lasers, game over. Try again! - Obtuse mechanics and UI. You'll be told you "collided with the planet" when you landed correctly. - Not much guidance on how to progress toward an endgame. Main quest clues are few and far between. All in all, I recommend it, because quirky niche labors of love deserve support! If the screenshots look amusing to you, you'll probably enjoy jumping around the star map and getting exploded for a couple of hours, and that's well worth $5.

Highly recommend this one. This is a really interesting space-based roguelike where you control a single craft out to find a MacGuffin that can stop a star collapsing. You get 1000 turns to do this. Most of the traditional roguelike trappings are here -turn-based gameplay, high difficulty, permadeath, procedural generation etc., but what really sets this game apart is the combat. All the combat entities are effected by what is basically Newtonian physics. This means that you can't turn on a dime because spaceships have inertia they need to overcome before they can turn. Depending on how fast you are going it may take several turns to stop and turn around. This means that you have to carefully plan out your encounters, not just out-gunning and out-thinking your opponents, but out maneuvering them as well. Your ship has multiple mount points, facing forwards, and facing port and starboard. All this coalesces into an experience that is more than the sum of it's parts. In an carefully upgraded craft you can feasibly fight several opponents at once if you are smart about it, and pulling it off is extremely satisfying (and hard as nails). Depending on how you have upgraded your ship in a given run the game can play out in vastly different ways. You really have to get a feel of what your current ship is capable of if you are going to win fights. Are you a heavy cruiser with tons of shields and armour that moves one tile at a time lighting the fuck up out of everyone in your wake, or are you a nimble fighter craft - darting in and out of the fray before the enemy has a chance to respond? It's all valid, all comes with tradeoffs, and is also out there for you to fight. The game takes place on a 5x5 galaxy map, where each sector on the grid is a procedurally generated star system, with planets, anomalies, enemies, stations you can trade with and repair at, and even black holes. You can jump between these systems at will (assumming your hyperdrive is charged) gathering intel, earning credits, and getting into fights. The game is a little content light at present. I haven't had a successful run yet, but I feel like I'm close. But it's fun - the combat is really unique, has excellent emergent elements to it, and is far deeper than it first seems. It's one of those systems where small additions can open up incredibly wide new possibility spaces, so I hope the devs add more stuff. For the price of a coffee!