Startide

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter / Bullet Hell Shmup

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

Startide is a 2-Stick Shooter with Bullet Hell Shmup-style gameplay, and this game is inventive in a lot of ways, and does so much right, but it seems like for everything it gets right, it gets something else wrong.

Let’s start with the good.

Startide does a good job mixing 2-Stick Shooter and Shmup elements, creating a solid gameplay experience that gives the player a lot of control, with action that feels good. Shooting and dodging around enemy fire works really well here, and everything feels fluid. However, the game goes a few steps farther than this.

Firstly, the giant enemy ships you fight throughout the game are modular in nature, meaning that you can pick each one apart piece by piece. But not every piece of a ship is going to be vulnerable, meaning that it’s up to you to circle the enemy ship to find the vulnerable parts (usually the extremities).

What’s more, as you progress through the game, you earn additional ships and upgrades to customize not only the base ship and three special weapons at your disposal, but modifiers for each of the weapons and a passive bonus as well. This amounts to a ton of flexibility in creating exactly the sort of ship you want to bring into battle. And much to my delight, this customization extends to the game’s 2-player co-op endless mode, where both players can fully deck out their own ships before heading into battle.

Graphically, the game looks excellent as well, with nice environments and solid framerates even with a lot of action going on all at once.

Like I said, this game has a lot going for it.

Now, on to the bad stuff…

First, right off the bat, the game’s menus are atrocious. Just navigating them is painful and sluggish, with every screen seeming to take time to load.

This sluggishness extends to the game’s campaign mode, which not only forces you through countless maps and menus just to get to the next fight, but also insists on loading in each new enemy of a location separately, rather than just spawning them onto the same screen as the last one, meaning that you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at loading screens.

Oh, and although you’ll want to play through the campaign to unlock stuff, the game throws a ton of text-based story at you throughout it that is just terrible schlock, the worst kind of sci-fi drivel, and not in the “so bad it’s good” sorta’ way either. Ugh.

Even though this is a two-stick shooter, with your thumbs firmly on both control sticks at all times, the game stupidly maps the special weapons to the face buttons, with nothing mapped to the L and R triggers. The game doesn’t let you re-map these controls either.

Enemy fire is often tiny or largely transparent, in a genre where you absolutely need to see every laser and bullet. There were times when I wouldn’t have known I was taking damage at all if my health bar wasn’t being whittled down.

The game’s sound and music feel dulled and distant, and the music itself is completely forgettable.

Despite the potential the modular enemy ship design presents, I never felt that enemy ships had all that much variety to them.

Every one of these complaints absolutely pains me to say, because the core gameplay here is so good, and I absolutely want Startide to be a better game. As it is, it’s still very good, but it’s depressing to see all the potential it had to be something so much better be wasted by some obvious oversights and rookie mistakes. With some polish, this game could have been a legendary entry in the genre. As it is, Startide is still pretty good, as long as you can tolerate its flaws.

tl;dr – Startide combines 2-Stick shooter and Shmup genre conventions and adds in some novel ideas of its own, with some excellent, fast-paced, quality gameplay… that’s unfortunately marred by a slew of design flaws and annoyances. It’s still very good, but it could have been so much better.

Grade: B

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