Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Oct 2, 2021

  Scary roomba game.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 25, 2022

  Ever since this game came out, I've enjoyed the game quite a bit. It scratches a pseudo-programming exploration itch in a way no other game can with a desperate setting that I personally enjoy quite a bit. It's not perfect and it needs a little bit more variety, but with the recent difficulty settings I think all of the most annoying parts of the game can be tweaked out in options now, so I definitely recommend it on that alone. But forget all of that. In a game that came out literal years ago, I ran into a bug that was causing me to see repeated story logs and that was blocking me from completing the new achievements, and I was crushed. I posted it to the Steam forum, and the developer of the game reached out to me and not only diagnosed the bug, but also fixed my save data and sent it back my way. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect this fellow to go so far out of his way to help me, a random player, that I was genuinely moved by the act. Regardless of anything else positive I could say about the game, it deserves a positive review for just how much of a champion the developer is. Seriously.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 22, 2022

  Now you can live out your fantasy where humanity somehow achieved FTL travel yet never developed past MSDos.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 18, 2023

  When you start to feel it's a little repetitive, and have a rithm going, everything goes to shit in a moment and you start to panic, making it even worse! have you ever imagined typing for dear life? well, now you can do it! Even with simple vector-like graphics, it still jump-scares me every now and then. It can get really hard, and makes you have to plan and think long term. The aesthetic, the ambiance... for me it's perfect. I only wish there was a multiplayer mode. Maybe in Duskers 2?
• gamedeal user

  Feb 26, 2023

  Got it for free on Epic, loved it so much that I came back to Steam to buy it full price.
• gamedeal user

  May 27, 2016

  [h1]In space no one can hear your drone break down. [/h1] Duskers is a space, strategy rogue-like with a dash of horror thrown into the mix. You find yourself in a universe devoid of life. How the universe has ended up this way is unclear, your goal is to uncover the universes secrets but to do that, you’ll need to survive. From the screenshots, and even from videos, Duskers doesn’t look like much. You’ve got an overview map of the ship which consists almost entirely of straight lines of a handful of colours and then you’ve got a top-down drone view which offers a closer look but still not much in the way of detail. However, what the developers have achieved with this graphic style is an incredible amount of immersion in the game (especially when coupled with the lack of any music in the game, just sound effects). Speaking of sound effects, they’re also very well done. The sound effects aren’t made to be the noises that you’d hear if you were standing next to the drone, they’re made to sound like they’re what the drones’ sensors pick up and send back to you. So, as I mentioned earlier, you have two goals in the game: survive (aka collect resources to keep yourself going) and figure out what the hell is going on in the universe. Both of these objectives require you to explore new ships with your drones. From time to time when you board a ship you’ll find a journal/transmission (which may have been corrupted by varying amounts) which shed some light on what’s happened. The entries don’t have any context so they don’t always make sense but they are pretty interesting to read. Once you’re on-board whichever ship you’ve chosen to explore, you’ll be able to move your drones around the ship and use the modules you’ve equipped them with to help search and collect resources. The main resources are fuel (for moving between ships and star systems) and scrap (for repairing modules and drones) but you may be lucky enough to find new modules, drones and even special modules for your ship. There are quite a few different modules (some of which are essential, you’ll always start with them though) which, when used, will allow you to play around with different strategies for exploring the ship. Among the essential modules are Gather (used to gather fuel or scrap) and Generator (used to power a ship generator, giving you access to more of the ship) while some of the modules may start with or find during a run include Stealth (allows you to make your drone invisible for a short time) and Motion (activates a motion sensor in nearby rooms, making it possible to tell if it’s safe to enter said rooms). Each drone can carry any combination of three modules and there’s no limit to what modules can be carried so if you wanted to have all four of your drones carry a Gather module you could, though that wouldn’t be particularly beneficial. When exploring ships you’re allowed to use four drones, though you can have three backup drones on your ship. For the most part, you’ll be commanding your drones during missions using the game’s simple commands (though there are more advanced commands which can be used for greater efficiency). In fact, it’s possible to play the game entirely using these commands though it can be helpful to individually control the drones with the arrow keys in the top-down drone view sometimes. The commands are really easy to get to grips with and there aren’t too many so they aren’t hard to memorise. The command box can also complete the word for you after you’ve typed in a couple of letters, it’s a pretty simple feature but it does speed things up a fair bit. Exploring derelict space ships is dangerous business mind you. One of your main concerns will be general wear and tear. After a few uses your modules will have an increased chance of breaking and this will continue to increase the more you use it. As I said earlier, modules (and drones) can be repaired but that does require a fair bit of scrap (scrap can also be collected by scrapping spare modules or drones). While wear and tear will be costly, it certainly isn’t dangerous. A universe devoid of life doesn’t necessarily mean a universe devoid of things that go bump in the night. You better watch yourself. Finding all of the resources you need can be a struggle but getting out with all your drones in one piece is the real challenge. The ships themselves are randomised so they come in a few different shapes and sizes. There are also certain types of ships, such as fuel barges and the different types of ships sometimes offer higher chances of finding certain resources, e.g. you’re more likely to find a fair bit of fuel on a fuel barge than any other ship. The size of a ship can range from three or four rooms all the way up to around twenty. The larger a ship is, the more dangerous it is to explore but the more resources you’re likely to find. You can of course leave a ship without exploring the whole thing though. The problem with the ships in the game is that there are only a few different sized rooms so even if the layout of the ship is vastly different it ends up feeling pretty similar to the last ship. This does mean that Duskers can feel a little repetitive, I found that I lost interest after playing two or three missions, but the game is good enough to keep me coming back for more. The other important part of a ship you’re exploring is the positioning/existence of airlocks. Your ship will always dock with a1 (airlock 1) on a ship and sometimes that will be the only airlock that the derelict has, though the usually have more. You can command your ship to reposition to one of the airlocks, this can be useful if most or all of your drones are closer to a different airlock. You can also open airlocks even if they aren’t connected to a ship. This will fill the adjacent room (and any adjacent rooms connected by open doors) with radiation, destroying anything that may be in the room. Just a few more things to wrap up. Each system has a minimum of three or four derelicts and it seems that the number of derelicts increases the further away you are from your starting system. There isn’t a difficulty setting in a traditional sense but there are a few different options you have to make the game easier or harder, such as how quickly modules degrade. You can save (by quitting) at any time but there’s no way to load earlier saves, if you screw up there’s nothing you can do unless you want to start a new game. [h1]Verdict [/h1] Duskers is an incredibly immersive strategy rogue-like that offers unique, challenging gameplay, though it may be held back by the somewhat repetitive ship layouts. If you’re a big fan of space games, rogue-likes or a combination of the two then you’ll probably be happy with a full price purchase (I certainly am), if you’re not then I’d suggest waiting for a discount. [i][url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/lonerangerreviews#curation]Lone Ranger Reviews.[/url][/i] El K.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 11, 2016

  I hate that I can't recommend this game. It's not really that the game is bad at all because it's good. It's quite good actually in making itself out to be a futuristic universe where everything's dead and gone(save the enemies). But perhaps it's too good at that. The game initially feels very forboding and downright terrifying since you've only got a limited number of drones and losing even one can mean game over, but the sense of fear you get fades to frustration as you have no way of knowing how the enemies in the game function unless you die to them over and over again while experimenting, or you google how they work. (looking at you slime) I don't like how fighting enemies works on this game at all. There is a difference between having a threatening enemy that you cannot fight directly and an enemy that will kill you before you have more than a second to react to it being there. The horror of seeing a swarm jump on you is immediately met with frustration because you wonder what you could have done differently upon seeing the swarm and realize that there is literally nothing barring a shield or some other kind of defense that is equipped on the drone. And even then the shield wouldn't help. Let me make an example here so that hopefully you can understand why I'm upset. Lets compare 'finding an enemy' to 'getting infested' in alien swarm. What happens in alien swarm is that you are essentially sentenced to death and there are only a few ways out of it. Number 1 is being healed until the infestation is gone and number 2 is using electric armor. Both methods expend resources making you weaker as a whole, but not outright killing you. In duskers the response to meeting an enemy is the equivilant of instantaneous death. Reaction in Duskers is waaaaaaay to reliant on planning putting you into the position of performing IMMENSE setup with very little reward. In fact I think that is my primary complaint about the game is that I don't feel rewarded at all when I perform the duties expected of me. I am simply like 'alright, one guy down, now to spend another 10 to 15 minutes setting up for the next guy'. This is only made worse by the fact everything in the game breaks and it breaks at ridiculous speeds. I can use a motion sensor in one mission like 3 times and it will barely increment and then I use it once in another and the damn thing is ready to break. How the hell am I expected to progress in the game when I can barely maintain it without performing such tedious tasks tantamount to filing paperwork or examining spreadsheets. Any fun in this game is lost on the random generative manner of the game because it's almost like a puzzle game that is generated randomly and to make up for the random nature the baddies are so incredibly powerful that one fuck up and yer dead. This game would be a lot better as a non randomly generated experience where puzzles were carefully crafted to test your ability to think and be creative, not request that you spend several hours examining a ship for minimal quanities of scrap materials so you can examine more ships for more scrap materials and hopefully piece together some story that may or may not even be worth it. The mysterious nature of why everyone disappeared isn't really excited when it's presented in text that is literally people going about their day to day god damned business. The little bits and pieces are not worth the effort. The game is so bland when it gets right down to it. There's so few enemy types, ships just blend together after a while and the differences of drone parts and functionality is so minimal. Beyond the great aesthetic there is so little to the game. In the end, the game itself isn't bad at all, but the asking price is WAY WAY TOO MUCH. I do not feel like I got my moneys worth. Also one last complaint, not being able to clear doorways is annoying. Also the game has some annoying bugs like scrap being dropped in between doorways and not being able to be picked up. TL;DR: Game gets stale fast. Not worth 20 bucks. Wait for big sale.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 8, 2016

  The good news: you came out of cryogenic suspension in good health. The bad news: you're critically low on supplies. The good news: there are plenty of other vessels within range. The bad news: they're all derelict. The good news: you have a fleet of salvage drones you can send into the derelicts to gather supplies. The bad news: your drones aren't the only things moving around those derelicts. And the other moving things are hostile. And the half-broken infrastructure on those derelicts is prone to fail explosively. And parts of your drones and your ship break too. And your only interaction with the outside world is with the drones. And your only interaction with the drones is through a clunky command-line interface. And you may be the last human alive anywhere. And if your drones die, you're next. So on the balance, it's mostly bad news.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2016

  Play this game with headphones on, the lights out, and the volume turned up. Great game, very simplified matrix and UI. I really enjoyed the typing of commands because it felt like I was actually controlling the robots from my spaceship. I wish there was an actual story though, or at least, some form of designated plot. Its very open ended and pretty difficult.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 6, 2017

  Is Duskers a fun game? Yes. Would I recommend it? No, because of one simple reason: A lack of content with no mod support. Duskers is a little like No Man's Sky in the sense that the first few hours are filled with fun and wonder, but everything afterwards becomes a disappointment because the game turns out to be far more shallow than it initially seemed. As a player, I yearned to explore more of the randomly generated galaxy in Duskers because I wanted to see what other horrors, mods, and derelict types I would encounter in the empty universe - but in the end, it turned out that there was really very little else to see besides what you find in the first couple of hours. Here's a quick rundown of where the content was most lacking: --Enemy types: there's only 4 different enemies. FOUR. They also behave pretty much identically with the exception of the last one. This was definitely the biggest interest-killer for me. --Derelict types end up mattering very little. Government A? Salvage C? Military B? It really doesn't change the layout in a particularly noticeable fashion, with the only differences being 1-2 extra ship defense turrets or something like that. I really, really wanted to give Duskers a thumbs up - I loved the aesthetic, I loved the atmosphere, and I loved the unique command line interface - but unfortunately, after a few hours, I came to realize that there's really just not enough actual content here, and that's heartbreaking for fans of this niche genre like myself.