Starlight Inception Review

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Reviewed on PlayStation Vita
→ April 29, 2014If the internet is any indication, I’m not the only one who remembers Wing Commander and its ilk fondly. Starlight Inception -- another crowd-funded passion project and the first mission-driven space combat sim on the PlayStation Vita -- seems remarkably well-positioned to capitalize on the re-emerging genre. And yet, it can’t.
As much as I hate to malign a scrappy independent game, Starlight is irredeemably flawed from top to bottom. During my playtime, every engaging moment was almost immediately tarnished by some new irritation, whether it was a technical issue, an aggravating design decision, or just simple boredom. Many of the underlying ideas showed real potential, but the consistently faulty execution undercut all that ambition.
Weirdly, the nuts-and-bolts gameplay is the only element the Vita version actually gets right (I say “weirdly” because baseline mechanics are generally the hard part). Flight controls feel reasonably responsive, reacting quickly and intuitively to my inputs. I could reliably target the right enemies and deliver hails of laser fire without much fuss. And that’s basically it. There’s nothing particularly fun or inventive about the combat -- no fancy high-speed maneuvering, unique weaponry, or memorable, distinctive gameplay hooks.
Unfortunately, there’s not much you can actually do with these totally adequate mechanics. Enemies, as a rule, are dumb as bricks and generally harmless. They fly aimlessly around the interstellar environments until you finally decide to shoot them, and when you do, there’s very little satisfaction due in part to the puny, distant explosion animation and impotent sound effects. The basic dogfighting units eventually start to pose a threat as their numbers grow in later levels, but even then the combat remains relatively brainless.
Mission objectives didn’t offer any real excitement either. Only in extremely rare instances do missions stray from the standard, predictable “fly to waypoint, shoot these guys” formula, and the exceptions are only marginally different. I experienced two or three larger-scale space battles that, for a brief, glorious moment, actually immersed me in the fantasy of space combat, but even these scenarios never required any actual strategy. I mean, you can technically issue basic commands to your wingmen, but (1) they generally just disappeared into the massive, empty environments and (2) I never encountered a mission moment that legitimately necessitated their assistance. “Point guns, fire lasers” got me through every tedious encounter just fine.
Worst of all, the action moves at a snail’s pace. Even once you buy faster ships (which take far too long to earn), Starlight Inception just feels slow somehow. And just to rub a little salt in the wound, mission markers are always, always needlessly far apart. I actually started timing some of these “traversal” sections because I had nothing better to do, and the longest single stretch I recorded was three and a half minutes. That’s three and a half real minutes of pointing my ship at a waypoint and waiting until it got there. Nothing else. It’s about as exciting as watching a load screen, and again, there were multiple sections like this in every level.

Oh, but here’s where it gets bad: The presentation is a trainwreck, from the user interface on down. The poor font choice makes most of the on-screen text extremely difficult to read, as if it all went through serious JPEG compression. The heads-up display is obnoxiously busy yet occasionally still fails to convey crucial information like the mission objective my radio buddies just vaguely described. The cockpit view also fails to convey… any information, really, since it crams everything into an unreadable dash and even adds a distractingly terrible pilot's joystick that blinks back and forth rather than smoothly mirroring player input. Also, hitting the “back” button while in the upgrade menu leads to an automatic purchase of whatever item you last selected (yeah, what?).
The graphics don’t fare much better. Some of the painted space backdrops are actually quite pretty, but everything else looks like it was poorly ported from a PSP game. Environments are dark and lack detail (though there’s plenty of aliasing to go around) while objects typically appear blocky and paper-thin. By the far the worst example is Starlight’s second mission, which takes place in an entirely terrestrial environment that’s shrouded in Superman 64-levels of fog and populated with clunky buildings that slowly pop into existence as you approach them. The entire area felt embarrassingly unfinished.

A later mission forced me to fly my ship into a small moon, which, for some reason, contained a maze of caverns. At close range the moon quickly became nothing but a screen-engulfing and totally disorienting gray smudge that proved all the more unnavigable thanks to the blinking waypoint that apparently wanted me to fly through the planetoid. This unholy marriage of thoughtless design and ugly visuals became my personal hell for the better part of an hour. You know how I eventually beat it? I accidentally clipped through a wall -- one of several serious glitches I experienced.
Maybe the story can redeem... oh, wait, nope. Sadly, the whole universe just feels deeply generic and unimaginative, aping every played-out, self-serious military sci-fi trope it can find. The dialogue is stilted, the voice acting is wooden, and the animations… actually, there are no animations. When characters talk, they simply stare unblinking into the middle distance and nothing moves besides their lower jaw. It’s eerie and kind of pitiful. Even the between-mission downtime on the home ship doesn’t add much because there’s nothing to see and no one to talk to.

It does, however, offer a simple but engaging tower-defense mode, which sheds some of the campaign’s filler and ultimately proves more engrossing as a result. There’s also competitive multiplayer, but here in the first week of release, I haven’t been able to join a single match.



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