Roguelite space platforms: Shattered Planet

I don't have a long history of playing roguelike games, but I do have a basic understanding of them. Ye olde venerated classic "Diablo" is actually - to what I imagine most people barely seem to recognize - based around roguelikes generations ago. I want to say it was based on "Angband", but I could be getting my history wrong. That's a dungeon in the pre-LOTR middle earth lore, if you don't know. A lot of the elements, like fog of war and unidentified items, owe their origins more to those games than the ARPG genre that later ran off with them.

ARPGs, of course, are generally more forgiving and built around smoother gameplay, but I don't think we're supposed to talk about that.

Shattered Planet cleaves closer to the earlier roguelikes. It is a turns and tiles based game, centered on exploring the eponymous shattered planet. The game makes quiet references to the idea that some scientific disaster tore the 'old Earth' apart, but within most of the game you will rarely see any real script on the topic.

You are, or rather you are a line of, clones sent down onto the planet for the purpose of exploring the planet. The game smoothly folds that element of the roguelike concept in, but a lot of the other stuff ... Let's say doesn't quite come together.


Shattered Planet is, at its core, a very simple game. Past the tutorial, you begin the game in your orbiting spacecraft and purchase various upgrades. Some are not available quite early on, but they unlock quickly. On the most part, a big chunk of the items you use come from the ship's inventory. They you teleport down and ... Well here's the game: You move from tile to tile on a turn based clock locked to your movement, and each action costs precisely 1 turn. Most enemies possess only a single attack, which happens after your attack occurs, and they move only when you move. There's an actual repeatable element where you need to "wait" a turn for the enemy to move up into range, as moving first means you can end up in their range when they go to move and instead they attack. The assets built up around this are nice looking, pleasing to the eye, though the game does not have even the slightest wow-factor to it.

Besides the chess board of pawn combat, Shattered Planet is mostly about exploration, but the game is... Middling to best at this. You can find enemies, various loot centric pick ups, and then random events. One of my issues with the game is how random the random events are; you can find basically any of them on any level, and they have a relatively limited number of outcomes.

Random events can reward you with fate bonuses, which increase your crit, an item or very rarely a pet. The game allows you a single pet, which you can re-produce once you've gotten one of them back at base. The pet AI is terrible and worthless, as you'd expect, and they don't heal themselves, often getting stuck on objects or breaking. It's one of those things where less is more: Sure, it's a cute feature, but watching your pet die because it straight up broke and is just sitting in the middle of the field is dismal.

The loot pool is ... Rather goofy. Items come in 3 tiers; bronze silver and gold, and go into two slots, and basically only two slots. Both groups of items, weapons or hats (you will only wear a hat, apparently) can have a couple abilities. On the most part this tends toward stat bonuses, some unexplained damage bonus, and then resistance or immunity to elemental damage types. Several of the items in the pool are useless or have drawbacks, but a couple have neat stuff like letting you break rocks or 'harvest plants'.

The item system is shallow, and honestly it is a bit lame for it easily could be. It is extremely rare to actually replace a piece of loot during a run, and all items are lost between runs, so you just go back to gambling for new items. So basically the entire purpose of a run is to pick enough crystals to gamble a couple times while upgrading your character. While I think this is a f2p phone game, I don't really get why you didn't have a somewhat more Diablo level loot system. Unidentified loot and lots of slot would make runs more exciting. There are unid'd "canisterss", which can be tested by throwing them at enemies or by drinking them, as well as guns. Both of which, when they're an offensive brew, are surprisingly useless. Guns and bombs often set fires, which is cute, in that you can't really afford to take 20 points of burning damage but the enemy doesn't care since hoboy there's more of them where that one came from. Guns have a number of charges, then recharge back to follow after enough turns have passed, and as such are pretty useless.

It also highlights another problem... Basically enemies are to be avoided, so all the game really is, is trying to avoid most of the challenging fights, clear out the trash and get to the exit for each level. There's also a mechanic in place to keep you from hanging around, as the map gradually "blights" and the blight vomits out blight-monsters. So it is kind of not about exploring in the daring way, not about combat and not great at driving you to loot pleasure.

Inversely, in spite of being not great at any element, Shattered Planet is very good at just being relaxing. The game isn't demanding, but it does favor a sort of low cunning that your brain responds well to. You want to sneak around, set fires and teleport enemies off cliffs, which feels satisfying. Combat is meh, and you don't really have a ton of great options for dealing with some fights.

All in all, while I don't think Shattered Planet is a game I'd have been satisfied if I got it for $10, it's fine enough to get in a bundle and I enjoyed my time with it. But eventually I'd seen 90% of what there was to see and the last 10% just didn't seem like it would be very interesting. Still, anything I manage to play for over five hours I feel pretty good about.