I have a bias towards party-based games when it comes turn-based combat, so I'm skeptical with this switch to a single character.

That said, after watching a couple of gameplay videos, there some aspects that might be interesting. Combat takes place seemlessingly in the environment instead of transitioning to a different screen. Positioning matters now that weapons have effective ranges and environment can be used to your advantage. There is supposed to be some environment interaction like explosive containers that can help or harm the player, but I'm not sure if it's been implemented yet.

Oh, you misunderstood me, I should have been more clear, it's not the grindiness that puts me off as much as the permadeath game mechanic! And yes, I do own starcrawlers, I guess I'm a sucker for gridders!

Will probably wait for some reviews before I go into it. It looks like my kind of gameplay and I did enjoy the first game. The environments just looks abit "samey" to the old game, maybe a different setting would have been better, like some alien jungle planet or something.