I had high hopes for STARBO. I am usually a huge fan of the “walking sim” type games. Sadly STARBO fell short in many ways. Some of it’sI had high hopes for STARBO. I am usually a huge fan of the “walking sim” type games. Sadly STARBO fell short in many ways. Some of it’s issues could be chalked up to low budget and not enough manpower to relize the developers ideas but regardless they are still issues. It had great concepts and ideas and had it been a little more fleshed out I may have enjoyed it more. The developer has talent though and I do hope he is able to try again in the future.
STARBO didn’t really know what it wanted to be. There were parts where it was a walking sim but other parts where it tried to be survival horror. One problem with that is that walking sims typically want you to look around it’s surroundings and soak up the atmosphere where survival horror games are supposed to be tense. The walking sim part didn’t work because STARBO didn’t have surroundings worth looking at. That’s not to say the graphics were poor but it was just kind of barren, lifeless, rooms with nothing going on. The survival horror part didn’t appeal to me because it is the kind of survival horror I despise: enemies that can kill me with 1-2 hits and that I have no way to fight back at. I can just run, hide and try to escape. I prefer games like Condemned: Criminal Origins or Resident Evil 1-3 where the ammo and weapons are sparse but I can fight back. The story could have been a saving grace for the game except it had no real end and lacked context in many parts. No real resolution is given at the end and many parts make no sense because while the main character says stuff like robots and whales are from his childhood he doesn’t expand on that and we are given no flashbacks. The music was well done though and it had a great art direction.
STARBO never crashed on me at all but it had a huge glaring issue that has never been fixed: It has to be played in windowed mode on Linux. When you chosoe fullscreen mode it won’t allow you to click on any main menu buttons and you have to force close the game. I have tried the game on various distros, AMD and Intel CPUs, as well as both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and always had that issue on Linux.The game did run well and was almost always at 100+ FPS on my system. It had multiple levels for AA, a toggle for Vsync and a few other graphics settings to tinker with. Alt-Tab didn’t work though and my game settings were not saved. Every time I launched the game I would have to reset my options.
It took me 95 minutes to beat STARBO. I don’t mind the length. I have played games with similar lengths such as The Station which I loved and played games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which I pumped over 60 hours into but was bored with. I paid $5.74 CAD for STARBO and felt that was a fair price for what I got. I played STARBO on Linux.
Overall I can’t recommend STARBO. It has too many flaws and issues to offset it’s great ideas and art direction. It needed a more fleshed out story and some technical bugs fixed at the very least.
My Score: 6/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.3.3 | Manjaro Mate | Kernel 4.20.11-1-MANJARO… Expand
