Bladestar is a vertical scrolling 2d retro arcade shoot 'em up/bullet hell with a sci-fi theme. This looks to be a copy + paste of a basic Unity shoot 'em up template, reskinned and re-arranged a bit... so there's no deep game design or development that's taken place, and what a surprise, this has resulted in a game with no deep interest, value or merit as a serious PC game.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Bladestar has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for collecting 10 blaster pickups, trivial to achieve, but less than 4 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the game. But this isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 4 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother to played the game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
Bladestar has the gamer gouging price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
[quote][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Response![/url][/quote]The developer has weighed in to inform everyone they didn't read the [url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/reviews]Developer Usage Rules[/url] for Steam "partners", or they deliberately ignored the part where Valve says:
[quote]Though it may be tempting, not every review needs to be responded to. A developer response will frequently draw more attention than the original statement, potentially turning a small issue into a much larger community discussion. It's also not a good idea to use this feature to refute customer opinions. Your direct attention can be seen as validation or a defensive attempt to silence your customers.[/quote]
The "developer", an American (why is it always Americans who can't handle not getting their participation trophy when they dump garbage on Steam?), admits this is the result of cobbling together some junk from Unity tutorials for shoot 'em ups, so this is on par with the observations in my review. The developer demands this is not an asset flip... my review doesn't indicate that it was as there was no evidence, but now, this assumption should be re-evaluated given the developer response, who doth protest too much about a claim I never made. Guilty conscience, perhaps?
But the completely comical part of this breach of guidelines is the developers claim that this game only bombed hard because they didn't market it, and not because it was utter crap because of all the reasons I provide in my review. The developer very helpfully indicates they did do some marketing for their recent game, and we can use this to see what a huge difference marketing has made.
The developers latest game is "Ancient Frontier: Steel Shadows", so let's go take a look at SteamDB to see the almighty power of the developers marketing, that will surely propel their game into stardom.
13 peak players. 5 years ago. 1-2 players per week, max.
What a joke! So the developers claim that this game only died hard because it wasn't marketed is nothing but bullcrap. A psychological cope to try avoid facing the stark reality that this is a crap game that only got sales because it has trading cards. As I said in my review, what value do developers like this give to the gaming community when all they're capable of is trading card shovelware? You can see why I warn gamers about this kind of thing, and the developers intellectual dishonesty doesn't help.
I'd like to thank the developer for invoking the Streisand Effect on themselves, at least we got a little laugh from that.
Nothing in the developers pointless breach of Valve guidelines changes any of the objective facts of my review. My review stands unaltered. I cannot recommend this game to anyone.
