The roguelike scene is one of the most hotly contested these days, with new entries in the genre (or projects that borrow elements from it) cropping up daily. Despite the torrent of new roguelikes, 2012’s Faster Than Light remains one of the best, with its simple but strategic spaceship battles. Lonestar, which has been building itself up in early access for some time now, is probably the closest thing you’ll get to a Faster Than Light sequel, and today sees it emerge into 1.0 with impressive amounts of content, loads of replayability, and now a proper final boss.
In Lonestar, the overarching goal is a fairly simple one. You pilot an upgradeable ship and accept bounties to bring in wanted space criminals. Once you defeat them in battle, turn them in, and accept your reward, you’ll be sent on a short vacation where you’ll go through scenarios and skill checks that can earn you new parts for your ship. Once your productive holiday has ended, accept another bounty and start your hunt all over again.
While that sounds straightforward, battles require a mixture of strategy, smart ships upgrades, and some good fortune from the dice gods. The roguelike has several different ship variants to pick from, each with different strengths, weaknesses, and layouts, and you must slot your best configuration of ship parts in order to maximize your damage output and survivability.
You will also play as one of the game’s huge lineup of pilots, which are characters with a set of randomized skillsets that you should pay close attention to and play into as much as possible when it comes to upgrading and laying out your ship.
Battles take on an interesting form. There are essentially three weapons on the front of each ship, and three ‘lanes’ where damage can travel through. Acting a bit like a tug of war, to deal damage to your opponent, you must outgun them in that particular lane. Say their weapon will dish out five damage points in the top lane, then you must charge up your top weapon using the dice numbers you roll to produce six or more damage points. However, if you know for certain that you can’t out-gun the enemy ship in a certain lane, you may be able to avoid the attack by shifting your ship up or down. However, this burns fuel, which is a limited resource, so you can’t constantly move throughout a battle.
Lonestar already had a pretty remarkable amount of content and replayability during early access, but with today’s 1.0 launch, it’s just upped the ante. The Spectra joins as yet another ship type. 13 new pilots arrive bringing the total number up to 52. Another 85 ship parts (known as ‘units’) have been added so the total now exceeds 200. The same is true for treasures, which you can find on your space travels, because another 90 have been thrown into the game. There’s a new difficulty level too, just in case you somehow found its previous hardest difficulty a little too easy. On top of all that, Lonestar’s proper final boss is now awaiting you. Despite its wealth of content, that really isn’t reflected in its remarkably low price.
Lonestar 1.0 is now live on Steam, and the game is now available to buy for just $11.04 / £9.34 thanks to an introductory 15% discount which expires on Thursday, April 17.
That sounds like a steal to me, and you can pick it up on Steam here if you so wish. However, if it isn’t quite what you’re looking for right now, check out some of the best space games and best strategy games to see if there’s something a bit more suitable.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
