Star Fire: Eternal Cycle is an action roguelike developed by Ethereal Fish Studio and published by Indie Herb Games. You play as various heroes going through different locations, fighting powerful insectoids to gain strength. Enemies continually get more powerful but you can utilize upgrades and moves to win. Choose from different weapons to vary your playstyle and make your way through five levels.
Your main goal is fighting through various insect creatures or insectoids to take their power and defeat bosses. It’s the standard roguelike where you defeat enemies and earn your reward, then choose what the next room is like. You have different weapons you can utilize though you can only switch at the start of a new run. Different attacks and effects let you pursue unique strategies when taking down enemies.
Learning to play is easy and the basics take you far even if you aren’t familiar with roguelikes. You don’t need special upgrades to defeat bosses if you are good at dodging. Your light attacks are quick and your heavy attack is powerful, letting you defeat enemies easily. While it takes time to learn enemy attack patterns, you don’t need to worry about environmental traps. Understand enemy movements and you can go far even on your first run.
However, the ease of playing only applies to combat. If you wish to go further and start boosting your stats, it becomes much harder. There’s barely any explanation about what some of the stats mean or allude to, so you must figure them out while playing but you can only equip a few Insectoid Cores, rare stat-boosting items. This means you often equip whatever Cores have good rarity while hoping they boost what you want.
There’s lots of weapons that give you an incentive to try them out. Fists are quick and effective while axes have more range and can unleash weaves. This gives you an incentive to unlock weapons and discover which weapon works best. Having multiple options also increases the replayability because there’s something new to test.
Even with the weapon variety and simple combat, Star Fire: Eternal Cycle is too similar to other roguelikes. You choose rooms, fight different enemies per run, and defeat bosses at the end. The graphics look nice but there isn’t much that differentiates this title from the others. Being quick to learn is an advantage but said advantage disappears once players get more practice. Without a strong differentiating factor, the game doesn’t stand out.
If you are looking for a roguelike that gives you decent fun in a platformer style, Star Fire: Eternal Cycle is a good fit. You can pick it up quickly and have a good time withn the solid fundamentals, and there’s good variety when it comes to enemies and weapon use. But some aspects aren’t explained well and it doesn’t do much to separate itself from other titles. Roguelike fans may enjoy their time with the game but with its low difficulty and lack of differentiation, Star Fire: Eternal Cycle isn’t a strong title to recommend.
Victor played Star Fire: Eternal Cycle on PC with a provided review copy.
