• Playtime: 1 hour (died to boss #2)

• Played: 2026

• Context: I dislike most roguelikes but i did like FTL.

Intro

LoneStar is a very basic roguelike, a turn-based strategy game with permadeath. You start with one ship and one captain and have to grind to unlock more options. Apparently there are lots of captains but it only shows three different ships (there may be more). Runs consist of battles interspersed with "vacation" e.g. up to six events to pick one-three from.

Battles are basically math tests. The enemy fires beams in each row and you have to block or overpower these by putting randomly drawn tokens in various modules that give boosts and the like. E.g. the enemy fires at 4 strength in a lane, you put a token worth 4 in a module that gives a +2 bonus so the enemy takes 2 damage in that lane.

Review

After dying to the second boss i got enough XP to go up to level 2. Unlocking the second ship requires level 5. Unlocking the first random skill for captains requires level 10. Custom mode requires level 30. I had unlocked 6 of the 34 captains. You have to do a ton of grinding to make the game a bit less boring because the various captains and their skills are the only somewhat interesting part of LoneStar. Everything else is just lots of RNG and math. Oh, and did i mention you can't even pick a captain but it's a pick-from-three with rerolls you get from beating elites? Lmao.