Astroloot is bullet hell ARPG in a spaceship. Where you face off against enemies in a mission area. There are many kinds of missions to mix things up. Along with a massive skill tree.
The game starts you off by picking one of three types of ships. I ended up going with the Tanky Brute one instead of picking a Glass Cannon or Fast and Dodgy. I always prefer having a bit more tank when checking out and learning a game.
While this game might look simple from the outside things start to get complex after your first couple of missions. The nice thing is you can even repeat and farm missions to gain additional experience and items for beating it.
Each mission does come with a first-time completion reward. That tends to help you out with extra ship points, weapons, and dice used to roll stats and items.
It did come quite in handy being able to reform lower-level missions to gain some further levels and hoping to get some upgrades along the way. By the time you get to the upper 30s during the beta things start to get a bit more challenging.
I’m rather glad I went with a tank and ended up picking up quite a lot of armor leche from damage as I could out of the ship skill tree. As there ends up being some rather dicey and thick moments. There were over 700 enemies in the arena with me when I took that screenshot. That is quite a lot of stuff to blow up!
The game features quite a few different kinds of missions you can run into. From killing everything, surviving 60 seconds, clearing waves, boss killing, collecting an item, and so on. Some of these types of missions require being a bit more tactful than others.
I often found the way I approached the survive 60-second rooms to be quite different if I just had to kill everything. I would often hang out at the edge of the arena but not go into the darkness and take on extra damage.
That would sometimes get me a good 15 seconds into the mission before any heavy combat engagements. Were I'd be weaving and diving all over the arena avoiding massive areas of effect damages, misses, and just pure insanity. Hoping to survive long enough that I'd get a mission completed.
After every mission then you get to check out the different dice and items you got from beating the mission. After a few levels into the game, you even unlock storage if you find yourself wanting to hold onto something instead of selling unwanted items to a vendor.
At first glance, your ship layout can be a little intimidating. It comes with two weapon slots, two shield slots, a nexus, a core, and a thruster. Many of these slots can even be further enhanced with additional mod slots.
Items in this game are where things start to get rather complex. They can roll all kinds of different stats, damages, resistance, and other stuff. You can even use all the different kinds of dice you have looted to upgrade them, reroll stats, add stats, and so on.
There are also many things to consider like wanting to be at 75% resistance towards kinetic, explosive, electric, plasma, and nuclear damage. Thankfully you don’t need to get all that on just single items. A few slots in your inventory can have module slots where your build starts to come together. From having 16% of all resistance from the diamond mod at level 11 to Armor on Hit mod on your weapons.
The nice thing is all of these items have a more detailed page you can pop up to show you the effects of a change you want to make. If there is an open mod slot and you highlight a mod it will even show possible locations that the mod can fit. However, just because you equip something does not mean it has any actual impact on you. So that is something to keep in mind.
Perhaps the best thing I like about the items is how the rolling stats feature works with dice. While in other games where you might have to burn such an item just to see the outcome. In Astroloot it shows you that outcome. That way you know if you will get what you want on the first try or if you will end up spending 10 dice and still not get what you desire to be rolled on an item.
For those that love to min/max a build, they have come up with. The dice system gives you a lot of customization in trying to make those perfect or near-perfect items. Not all items are however worth spending dice on getting as they might not have dropped with a good base number and tier. Other things like rarity you can use dice to increase.
There is also another huge component to your guild the ship tree. This thing is massive. While there are a couple of filters to try and find things on it. It is worth spending the time to hover over everything first and try and plan a route out you want to spend your points on as you level up.
The tree is so big it would take me about eight or so screenshots to show it all. There are things on there from increased attack speed to 40% of one damage type converted to another. Nodes that remove your ability to use jump but give you 50% more armor. There are even a bunch of minion nodes for those that take that route instead.
All of these things give you a lot to think about when working out a build while you level up and progress in this game. So that you can be the one who survives and gets to enjoy some rather insane moments of combat.
This game was still in early access at the writing of this. There were clear moments where the build I came up with hit a massive wall. It seems like there is some expected balancing and changes to come.
I’m sure players will also come up with far more powerful builds than the random one I put together between what I was looting. That will be able to just smash through anything thrown at you.
The nice thing is at least when you fail a mission. You can stop for a moment and make some changes to your build as needed to give you that slight edge needed for the win. Some missions are more about bringing enough DPS while others you just need to out-tank the insane damage coming in long enough for the win.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Astroloot.
Disclosure. This review was written while the game was in early access.
Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.
