StarCrawlers

  • Use free-look every so often, there is stuff like items and switches which require a bit of looking around beyond the 90° angles you get from standard movement.
  • Stuns are insanely good and you should try to have at least one available to your party. Engineer and Hacker have the earliest available stun moves, but Force Psyker has the most powerful one.
  • Unless you want to grind a lot of side missions (which I couldn't fault you for, they're actually fun), you should probably hire a central party of 4 (3 plus your main character you started with) and level those up instead of hiring additional crawlers early. The units you can hire are always available at your primary character's level, but once you recruit one they only gain XP when you take them with you.
  • Doing a quick deck-hacking mission will force the store inventories to update. They also make quick money. Your deck will pay for itself and then some if you do this fairly often. It isn't the greatest minigame ever but it's not bad once you get a good menu of programs to use. The fastest ones are those where you only need to blow up two security nodes, most of those can be done in less than 3 minutes with a decent deck.
  • Each class has a unique ability that it can use for certain encounters/situations, but you can never have all of them available to you at once since you can't go crawling with more than 4 characters. I found Hacker to be the one that comes into play the most often, and it's by a considerable margin. That said, no class is really required.
  • You can reassign your talents for cheap at the clinic, feel free to play around with them as much as you want - you can always take a side mission that's a level or two below you for an easy ride if you're not sure and just want to test a build.
  • The randomized white/green gear from the crates in the black market are trash, don't bother - only buy blues.
  • At certain reputation cutoffs, you'll get favor points from groups that like you - you can spend these to get stuff from them. Check back regularly because additional rewards become available as your reputation goes up and spent favor points replenish over time.