Take a look on the Change’s collection of mech titles, from Daemon X Machina to Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Version, and also you’re more likely to discover a sample. Except for the occasional outlier just like the tactical Entrance Mission remakes, action-based gameplay is nearly at all times on the forefront when mechs are concerned.
It’s simple to see why — these ever-alluring visuals of awesome-looking robots flying round and duking it out function the right basis to craft weighty, tactile, and high-octane fight methods. Regardless of this precedent, developer IKINAGAMES has opted to interrupt from the pack and check out translating the enjoyable of the mech style right into a slower-paced, classically-styled expertise. ‘Attempt’ being the operative phrase right here.
STARBITES is Ikina’s tackle the mech style, given life within the type of an old-school, turn-based RPG. Set in a distant future the place humanity has efficiently colonised the star system, you play as Lukida, a scavenger on the wartorn desert planet Bitter who owes an eye-popping quantity of debt to the chief of her metropolis. Aided by her buddies and outfitted with their trusty mechs (often called Motorbots), Lukida units out to discover a option to escape her debt and depart Bitter behind.
It’s a promising idea at first look, however Starbites options far too many ache factors — from technical deficiencies to uninspiring gameplay ideas and a messy narrative — to finally take flight.
There’s an unpleasant elephant within the room that wants addressing proper off the bat: Starbites appears extraordinarily tough on Change. Decision in handheld mode is fuzzy, right down to in-game textual content bubbles and loading screens. The sport’s docked mode profile fares higher, however each modes undergo from some downright abysmal texture work. Surfaces of all the pieces from background property to components of character fashions seem like blurry smudges, severely hampering the sport’s vibrant and cartoonish artwork type.
It could be simpler to forgive Starbites’ visible shortcomings if efficiency was stable, however it suffers from its fair proportion of body drops, lag spikes, and stutters. The unique Change could also be lengthy within the tooth, however it’s a indisputable fact that it’s able to working way more visually-intensive titles than this with extra constant efficiency.
As soon as you progress previous Starbites’ poor technical first impression, you will get to grips with its central gameplay loop. As Lukida, you traverse the barren plains of Bitter and its varied locales, piloting your Motorbot by means of labyrinthine areas crammed with enemies, loot, and light-weight puzzles. Between excursions, you possibly can enter a variety of POIs on foot, inside which you’ll discuss with residents, tackle aspect quests, improve your Motorbot, buy gadgets, and extra.
The exploration element of gameplay isn’t wholly unenjoyable, however it’s simplistic to a fault. In observe, area traversal quantities to working into foes to activate battles, hitting ‘A’ to choose up glowing gadgets and open chests, and activating terminals with key gadgets to progress ahead.
As soon as it turns into clear that the sport doesn’t iterate on this loop in any significant method throughout its whole runtime, the enjoyable issue dulls fairly rapidly. Areas are additionally visually bereft and same-y, even deep within the sport’s later hours, which ostensibly function extra various environments. To high it off, mech controls are sluggish and unresponsive, making it simple to overshoot your goal.
The sport’s turn-based fight system can be decidedly easy, although to extra beneficial outcomes. In battle, you management a group of three occasion members and their Motorbots. On their flip, every character can carry out primary actions like attacking or guarding, or eat TP to unleash a bunch of flashy particular strikes with elemental affinities. Hitting an opponent’s elemental weaknesses repeatedly will scale back their Break gauge to zero, quickly incapacitating them and growing injury obtained. In the meantime, utilizing sure assaults or taking injury will fill your characters’ Driver’s Excessive gauge, permitting you to skip the flip order and unleash an extra-powerful model of one in all your strikes.
Recreation-specific jargon apart, these fight options will show loads acquainted to veteran RPG followers. However what the sport’s battle methods lack in innovation, they make up for by being refreshingly accessible and simple to study. It additionally options strong ability bushes for every character, encouraging you to energy up present strikes and skills relatively than simply tossing them away in favour of shiny, new ones. Forming a technique that capitalises on the distinctive strengths of every occasion member and their ever-expanding arsenal of methods is stable enjoyable.
My solely main criticism relating to Starbites’ fight is that it would not capitalise on its mech-themed flavouring in any substantial method. You equip every character’s Motorbot with commonplace RPG-style armour, in addition to engines and cores that supply distinctive fight bonuses, however that’s about it. In the event you had been to theoretically take away the Motorbots and alter it so that every character used all of their skills by means of magic, not a lot would functionally change. It looks like a missed alternative to not incorporate extra mech-specific methods into battles, seeing as they’re such a core focus of the title’s setting and narrative.
Talking of narrative, Starbites’ is a combined bag. Lukida’s quest to flee Bitter rapidly spirals into one thing a lot grander, as she uncovers long-held secrets and techniques relating to each the planet’s previous and her personal. There’s a powerful quantity of worldbuilding at play, with completely different occasions, characters, and areas connecting to 1 one other in attention-grabbing methods.
Sadly, the sport does a shoddy job of explaining all this lore, making the context that drives the plot ahead unnecessarily convoluted. The story touches on a variety of moral themes, together with synthetic intelligence, cybernetic alterations to the human physique, and digital consciousness, however it finally doesn’t do a ton with them. The sport additionally depends on drained, textbook twists that you may see coming from a mile away, making the narrative really feel toothless at occasions.
Most frustratingly, characters and plot factors that really feel like they’re going to be vital usually get brushed to the aspect, solely to perfunctorily reemerge as the sport reaches its conclusion, in the event that they return in any respect. A number of of your occasion members solely get their backstory defined within the last one or two hours, as if the builders immediately remembered they wanted to clarify why these characters are related in any respect. Even then, there are a ton of lacking particulars and context that simply will get utterly glossed over.
On the opposite aspect of the coin, the characters themselves are typically likeable. A lot of the essential solid fall into conventional tropes and archetypes: Lukida because the scrappy chief with a coronary heart of gold, Badger because the grizzled veteran with a tough previous, Makobo because the nerdy lady with a ardour for hacking, and so forth.
That mentioned, the dialogue script is good and sharp, and characterisation is additional bolstered by sturdy vocal performances throughout the sport’s English dub choice. The sport strikes a cheery, adventurous tone for many of its runtime, which is a stable change of tempo from the grittiness that always pervades cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic tales.
The sport’s supporting solid, from a swindling bartender thief to a shopkeeper (who is unquestionably not an alternate-universe model of Physician Eggman), is arguably much more entertaining than the principle solid. A number of of the cyborgs and robots are, maybe deliberately, the liveliest characters you meet — and some particularly are downright hilarious. Finally, the sport had me wishing a few of these aspect characters had been those who joined my occasion relatively than the teammates I ended up with.
If that was all there was to Starbites, I’d be content material in chalking it up as an unambitious, visually lacklustre RPG with some shiny spots in fight and character writing. Sadly, there’s one final woe that pushes issues over the sting: the Change model of the sport is an unabashed technical mess.
Over the course of my playthrough, I ran right into a borderline comical laundry checklist of bugs, glitches, and errors: sport crashes, textures bugging out, lacking fight results with visible artifacts, the digital camera breaking and never following me, lacking vocals throughout cutscenes, dialogue strains attributed the flawed character, character vocals not matching up with the in-game script, vocals the place actors flubbed their strains, character fashions snapping into default positions throughout cutscenes — the checklist goes on and on. Once I reached the ultimate boss, it was utterly lacking all of its sound results. A lot for an epic conclusion.
Starbites isn’t simply unpolished on Change. It’s unfinished.
