Pixel Star

I expected [i]Pixel Star[/i] to be one of those awful clones of arcade games that makes no meaningful advances to bring its formula into the 21st century, and I was only kind of right. It doesn’t really have any unique ideas, and it doesn’t really execute any individual thing well enough to earn any points with me, but I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised by it. For one thing the controls are functional, which is far more than I was expecting. If I were holding this to Steam’s standards instead of my own, I would lavish it in praise merely on this front - I can play it without feeling, at every moment, like I want to stop. I like the way the ship instantly turns to face your cursor; it feels so much more skill-based when you don’t have to fight the controls themselves as well as the enemies the game throws at you. Aside from meeting the basic standard for how a bullet-hell shooter’s controls should work, [i]Pixel Star[/i] doesn’t have anything going for it. You just sort of drift aimlessly around largely empty space until you stumble upon a boss fight. It does feel more or less fully fleshed-out, but honestly every nice little thing this game has going on pales in comparison to the enormous distance between this basically acceptable product and what I would consider to be a worthwhile use of anybody’s time.

Pixel Star is a twinstick shooter with a straightforward premise, but it's a bit rough around the edges. It's certainly more entertaining than it's primary visual inspirator, Asteroids. I like the deployment options which remind me of Gradius 2 in that you can change your weapon loadout. This means drops aren't so much different weapons. They instead consist health, ammo & general upgrades. I much prefer this as the difficulty curve doesn't need to be progressively adjusted as much over time. Still, some of the upgrades aren't so balanced that there isn't objectively better options than others. The game becomes more lively once you've beaten a couple bosses as the enemies become more aggressive & higher in numbers. There are a lot of little things I dislike however. I can usually handle a few crashes, but in just the first hour of play it crashed on me 3 times. It did output an error, so I'll be reporting that to the developer. Some menus including the main options are not navigable with the gamepad at all. It feels like this was only tested for mouse & keyboard. Sometimes the menus freak out a bit too and things become unselectable. I think it might be the inputs are overriding each other and it's resetting the menu every time it does that, just guessing. If these input issues were fixed, I would lean on recommending. Otherwise the in-game controls actually work quite well. Left stick to move, right to aim, shoulder buttons to shoot or use sub weapons. Analogue movement was done correctly here. I have to commend the developer with a very nice job on that one. The graphics weren't that much to look at to begin with, but I don't like how there is no maintained low resolution that's upscaled. It makes the pixel ratio look completely off when you have low res sprites with high resolution effects on top. It lacks visual cohesion and just looks like thoughtless juicing. Hit collision areas don't feel very well defined because of some cloudy projectiles & bodies. Premade bosses are randomly called chronologically. Is there some kind of big bad after you beat so many? I don't know. I wish it would be up-front about it being an endless game or not. The game is pretty tough & I can't beat more than 3 bosses in-a-row though. Guess I just need to get good at it. The game's almost good enough for a recommendation, but until at least the input issues are cleared up, I can't recommend it even if I do think it's a bit fun. For the sake of transparency, this game was given to me as a gift. I would like to thank that friend for their gift. I plan to pull no punches for this critical review for the sake of accuracy for anybody that might be reading this. Hope this review helped your purchasing decision. Please leave a comment if you have any objections to my critiques & thanks for reading.

blah fairly drab. COntrols are a bit wonky.

Very fun game with big variety of upgrades and items. Every new game feels like nice gambling. For it's money this game is definitely recommended.

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[h1]Playable, but not incredible[/h1] I dunno, maybe the title it a bit too harsh. Anyway, Pixel star, decent game! There is only so much to be said about this game since it's basically the same thing every time - survive and fight "bosses". As for someone who likes bullet-hell games and flashy colours, this is a good one! In Pixel Star you're basically a space-ship that flies around space trying to kill enemy space-ships and get points, there are chances for a perk to fall of an enemy ship or anything that you destroy really that may upgrade your ship, every so often you'll face a boss and if you happen to defeat it you'll encounter harder enemies. Gameplay is nice alright, you do need a good strong pc to run this game on high settings but on low it basically looks the same and really smooth so it's no problem. Music's kinda weird i'd admit, it took me a few mins for it to dig inside my brain and it was kind of annoying? Maybe someone would like that, not my taste though. I mean, it's a simple game, and it's nice. That's all there is to it really. If you wish to spend your time somehow, this is a good recommendation, it is fun to some extent yet annoying when you lose (obviously). The price is alright, i would say it's worth to buy this game, it's not too expensive, fun, pleasing to the eye (oh boy) and there are no "bad things" about it, i couldn't find any cons.

An improvement to the Asteroids formula, well-worth your time.

a game that lets you feel like you're completely overpowered while still ramping up the difficulty fast and hard. there's even a degree of customization, but if you use any secondary weapon other than gatling gun you're a scrub. some crap design features are present, like collecting bonuses like cargo and civilians by colliding with them. the cyclops boss also has an eye lazer attack that kills your framerate something fierce. if you like space shootan games and can afford to eat food on a monthly basis, you wont regret buying this