Excubitor Reviews

Frustrating and not fun.

I realy love this game played a alpha version years ago on the Gamescon in Germany

Years ago it was not bad, but now there is a bug that makes the ship almost unmanageable. Too bad the game was nice.

I was intrigued by the concept of this game, but ultimately found it repetitive and very difficult even on the normal setting. It didn't really bring anything NEW to the table. I returned it for a refund.

Lacks the diversity of mechanics that is essential to the tower defense genre. Only three upgrade levels per weapon, and only two weapon slots leaves the player with a feeling of disconnection from excitement. Towers can only be placed in specific locations, often lacking strategic value and drawing out excessive effort for almost no payout.

Wow, a great blend of classical shmup and tower defence. It's quite hard though, so it takes some effort. Amazing such a game was produced by a small team of devs, imagine what they could do with AAA money behind them :)

Excubitor seems to be a fusion of Steel Storm and Defense Grid. Sadly, the tower defense part is very shallow, and one you will need to place and forget early in most missions. Unfortunately for the other part, the game has not learned from the problems Steel Storm had, and quickly becomes a frustrating dash between objectives and your mother ship trying to cover for your inadequate turret defense. Wile upgrading turrets would seem to be the answer, it becomes obvious by the first boss fight that it won’t work. The turrets are sparse screen not a wall, and they end up ineffective. You can guard the ship or attack the boss, not both. BTW the boss has an instant death attack and hiding is your only option...except that seems to glitch out and not work later in the fight. It looked like a fun time, and started out as one. But I don't have time for this kind of frustration. Your call if you want to play this game but I'm moving on.

Another bug riddled mess with major pauses and hitching. Good grief whatever happened to making classics like GRID DEFENSE.

[h1]See [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34168470-Trutek-Gaming/]curator page[/url] for more reviews. [/h1] Excubitor is a game that says it merges tower defense with with top down shooter, or even bullet hell. Is it successful mix? Not very. In Excubitor, most levels look like that: somewhere on small or medium sized map is placed Antares, your mothership. Your task is to defend it from drones - which take forms of various ships, mechs and other land units - using Hammerhead - your fighter and turrets. Turrets can be placed on few specific places on map. Sadly, they are mostly useless. What is wrong with them? First, there is no information about damage they deal, their range, firerate etc. Secondly, they are simply weak. While during early missions they can kill and heavily damage weaker enemies on their own, with later missions and higher difficulties, with more and stronger enemies, they become more and more useless. Theoretically they can be upgraded, but there is problem with resource used for that - electricity. You gain set amount of it before each mission, and can gain some more by building generators. Building one takes some voidshards - other source used for buying and upgrading weapons - and one of points for building turrets. Those generators don't give much energy, and cannot be upgraded further. So either you will have bunch of useless turrets, or few strong ones heavy cannon turrets at one point, and all others unprotected. On higher difficulties and some missions you will probably skip all damaging turrets together and will just built cryo and emp turrets, which will slow down enemies and disable their weapons, so you will have more time to shot them down with fighter. Fighter has quite large selection of weapons, which is nice. The weapons also feel and work different, which is additional plus. Sadly, just like for turrets, there are no stats for weapons. Each weapon can be upgraded three times, but is hard to say whether that "damage +14.88%" upgrade is worth it or not without any stats. What is also bad is the fact you can take only two weapons. This completely removes point of having varied arsenal with different weapons having different roles and strengths - add to that lack of stats and in the end, you will probably just be flying around with newest weapon or the one that feels most comfortable to you. Also there are no maps in this game in which you are fighting against one type of enemies like in many tower defense games - so there is no planning like "lost of small enemies - I will take shotgun and flamethrower" or "few heavy enemies - I will take railgun and rocket launcher". Later on you will also get weapon that is much better than any other so all of this becomes meaningless. Anyway, it definitely should be changed - from what I have seen, in beta versions there was inventory of sorts, and I think it wasn't bad idea. Either you should have access to all weapons after buying them, but with limited ammo, or you should have ability to rearm at Antares during mission. You can also upgrade your fighter speed, shield, armour and weapons system. Of course you can probably guess that there again are no stats, so you don't know how much your speed or shield is boosted. Personally I wasn't feeling difference before and after upgrades. Only noteworthy things from them are berserk and repulsor skills. Honestly I would preferred if Antares could be upgraded instead of (or in addition to) Hammerhead. It would greatly benefited from stronger shields or having ability to recharge them. During missions, it's best to stay near one of the roads and to kill enemies as soon as possible. Theoretically you can also explore the map, but with each level there is less reason to do it. There are some destructible structures, and powerups and voidshards containers that can be captured. Problem with them is that value of voidshards they give doesn't scales with levels. So early they give quite big amount, but later, when upgrades cost tens of thousands, single 20 voidshards form destructibles is laughable and not worth flying to second end of map. On one level there is capturable additional generator, on another there is laser drill that continuously gives you voidshards. Sadly both appear only once in entire game. Why? Things like that actually make exploration fun and worthwhile. There also additional and secret objectives, but they don't change much expect giving additional voidshards, even though game tips say that doing them gives additional skill points. Enemy variety is rather mediocre. Enemies are varied, but number of their types is not that big. I felt few times jealous of their weapons - why I don't have shockwave that harms everything near? Why I don't have tractor beam that stops enemies? Graphic is quite nice, game is mostly stable, I had one or two random crashes, also on one level I could fly off the edge of map. Still the game is not worth 14,99€ - you can get better tower defense games or top down shooters for that price or cheaper, and compared to them this games doesn't really have replayability. Only thing there is is new game + which is redoing the same levels on much higher difficulty. It's also very unfun, relying on usage of skills and slowing turrets, in which single enemy can destroy Antares on his own with few attacks. Still maybe it could be worth to pick on high discount on sale if you want to try. Also the game heavily suggests addon or sequel - if it will happen, the game should be heavily remaked, or perhaps turned into just shooter or just tower defense game.