As an auto-battler roguelite, you probably know already if Deadlock Station is your jam. You’ll manage three characters at a time as they fight their way through environments, collecting equipment and cash along the way, hopefully managing to keep death away long enough to bring all that loot back with you. And if not? Well, you can just try again and maybe you’ve learnt a little something for next time. It’s not particularly unique, but it is great at what it does, even if it does end up a bit too repetitive.
Being an auto-battler, it’s pretty simple to play. Each battle happens on a single screen, and depending on the scenario the enemies could be on one side, or around the outside, or even hiding in piles of trash for some reason. You place your fighters where you need them and start things up. They will move around and attack of their own accord, but you do have a little input and can interfere to trigger an ability, target an important enemy, or to stop them splitting up so they don’t die.
When you hover your cursor over a character’s abilities, the game goes into slo-mo so you can decide, or you can just pause it entirely if you want to spend more time to figure out how to salvage things. Once you’ve (hopefully) won, you’ll find equipment that you can equip on your characters, or even a mod that your cybernetically enhanced characters can use for a choice of three upgrades. Then you pick from up to three options for the next area based on the loot preview and scenario it gives you and head off, presumably telling your characters to “Get ready for the next battle!” like the announcer from Tekken.
It’s not always fighting. There’s the obligatory merchant, but sometimes you’ll find an event that lets you duplicate one of your items, or you’ll be squeezed for cash by a passing bandit. If you’ve got a particular character in your party, you may be able to threaten that bandit to get out of paying or fighting them off.
Combat is surprisingly engaging for something that can happen mostly on its own. A well timed use of an ability can make all the difference, so you do need to pay attention. These abilities can be as simple as a personal shield or healing, up to things like shooting a bomb at literally every enemy in combat, which is absolutely invaluable. That’s actually an issue, because it’s so powerful that not having it seems like a mistake, so the character and that skill slot are practically essential for any run. The less powerful ones are very situational, but a boost to your melee character’s speed to get them to the rest of the team might also become invaluable.
There are a couple of other things to consider with obstacles, hazards, and…whatever the opposite of hazards are. Happy places? A hazard will damage a character if they walk onto it, obstacles must be destroyed if you want to walk through their tile, and happy places will give you a bonus, often to damage. This is the same for enemies as well, and as is typical of enemies in video games, they like to have explosive barrels around. Shoot a barrel and it’ll explode, damaging and knocking back anyone around it, possibly knocking them back into further hazards if you plan it right.
Just before combat begins, you can tap veins of ore with a mining drill, netting you a cash reward if you survive. Enemies have a habit of targeting those drills, so you’ll want to keep them well defended or it’ll be destroyed and wasted. It’s yet another element that means you’ve got plenty to think about and do while playing.
Once you make it home (or die), you’ll be able to spend the cash you’ve earned to unlock new equipment and skills for your characters. Items tell you the odds that you’ll encounter them in a run whilst you’re unlocking them and can be bought with the aforementioned cash, whereas character skills must be purchased with a specific currency that’s awarded through play. Each character has four slots for skills and usually about eight skills to choose from, though some of them are pretty same-y between characters. Equipment has the same issue; it’s just rarely exciting, mostly just buffs to stats that are effective but also a bit dull.
Due to all this, Deadlock Station is pretty enjoyable. The only thing that really takes it down is that the grind to unlock things feels particularly slow early on, which makes the game take longer to get going than necessary. It’s also very repetitive, since to unlock new areas you have to beat the boss in the previous one, but you can’t just go fight the boss when you fancy it. No, you have to make multiple runs first. It didn’t need to be quite so repetitive and it might outstay its welcome for some people because of it.
