Starshot looks like a fun game. It has a very whacky story and fun looking characters. You play as Starshot, designed to be an emotionless super soldier but he gained a conscience and joined a struggling space circus. They need to put on the show of a lifetime in order to pay off the bank, or else they’ll all blow up.
Travelling across multiple planets to find some interesting “exhibits”, the underappreciated Starshot, with the help of Willfly and Willfall, is tasked to do all the hard work.
With some fun levels and decent platforming, this would be an enjoyable romp. Sadly, this isn’t the case. The platforming is extremely rough. Starshot’s acrobatic jump doesn’t feel natural and it’s extremely difficult to judge its distance – he’ll fall down a lot of bottomless pits because you thought you were above a platform.
The frameratre is also over the place, so many of your jumps will be further ruined by the game slowing down and messing with how long you need to hold forwards more. Most of the death feel like the game’s fault. Surprisingly, Starshot is one of the few N64 games that offers proper widescreen.
While the levels are interesting in terms of theme – and some have interesting backstory to them, the level design itself is atrocious, mostly comprising of long, thin platforms across bottomless pits. None of the levels are fun to navigate, to the point where it’s best to get as many fuel tokens as possible and use Willfall (your little rocket robot) to fly and skip as much as you can.
And I haven’t even talked about the camera. It starts out promising, as you can freely move the camera and even set the distance you want. If it stuck like this, it would be fine, but the camera constantly attempts to get into a “better” position and this throws off your movement even more. While in an indoor area, it swings about widely and you can never see what you want to look at, with enemies right in front of you being off-screen.
It really is a shame as there is a lot that I would enjoy about the game if the core mechanics simply worked. The objectives are silly in a fun way, and some of the details – such as why everyone on Earth was wiped out – are great. The ending is pretty horrible, (being a sequel bait when they had no intention of making a sequel), and jumping in the final level results in instant death, but there are plenty of nice ideas throughout the game – just none of them executed well.
Travelling across multiple planets to find some interesting “exhibits”, the underappreciated Starshot, with the help of Willfly and Willfall, is tasked to do all the hard work.
With some fun levels and decent platforming, this would be an enjoyable romp. Sadly, this isn’t the case. The platforming is extremely rough. Starshot’s acrobatic jump doesn’t feel natural and it’s extremely difficult to judge its distance – he’ll fall down a lot of bottomless pits because you thought you were above a platform.
The frameratre is also over the place, so many of your jumps will be further ruined by the game slowing down and messing with how long you need to hold forwards more. Most of the death feel like the game’s fault. Surprisingly, Starshot is one of the few N64 games that offers proper widescreen.
While the levels are interesting in terms of theme – and some have interesting backstory to them, the level design itself is atrocious, mostly comprising of long, thin platforms across bottomless pits. None of the levels are fun to navigate, to the point where it’s best to get as many fuel tokens as possible and use Willfall (your little rocket robot) to fly and skip as much as you can.
And I haven’t even talked about the camera. It starts out promising, as you can freely move the camera and even set the distance you want. If it stuck like this, it would be fine, but the camera constantly attempts to get into a “better” position and this throws off your movement even more. While in an indoor area, it swings about widely and you can never see what you want to look at, with enemies right in front of you being off-screen.
It really is a shame as there is a lot that I would enjoy about the game if the core mechanics simply worked. The objectives are silly in a fun way, and some of the details – such as why everyone on Earth was wiped out – are great. The ending is pretty horrible, (being a sequel bait when they had no intention of making a sequel), and jumping in the final level results in instant death, but there are plenty of nice ideas throughout the game – just none of them executed well.
Good animations
plataformer 3d muito bom, o fps cai bastante em várias situações e a câmera é bem pior doq poderia ser, apesar do controle dela ser bem bom.
achei relativamente pequeno mas as áreas são até que grandes e são boas de explorar, mas tem umas que a dificuldade sobe demais se comparado ao resto do jogo
achei relativamente pequeno mas as áreas são até que grandes e são boas de explorar, mas tem umas que a dificuldade sobe demais se comparado ao resto do jogo
I got this game when I was a kid. I still feel the disappointment to this day.
What the hell did I play? This probably did some brain damage to me as a kid.
Laggy mess, horrid platformer; do not play.
Laggy mess, horrid platformer; do not play.
I lost my patience with this one.
Technically it looks nice for an n64 game and camera controls were actually really good. You can zoom out and in as much as you like. And if you zoom all the way out it's pretty impressive to see the scope of how much the n64 can run, ALTHOUGH the game lags hard, which is a problem for a platformer that relies on heavy precision.
I do like Starshot's quirky world and vibe, but the gameplay just wasn't up there.
Starshot controls like piss and does his triple jump by holding the jump button not by consecutive presses which makes timing jumps very akward alongside his full trottle acceleration and bad traction.
Then there's the level design which made zero sense to me and I pretty much got tired of running back and forth trying to figure out what to do. You have no iframes so enemies hit until you either manage to jump away or get pushed down a pitfall.
I have some fond memories of this game when it came out back in the 90's, but sadly some memories are better off preserved.
Technically it looks nice for an n64 game and camera controls were actually really good. You can zoom out and in as much as you like. And if you zoom all the way out it's pretty impressive to see the scope of how much the n64 can run, ALTHOUGH the game lags hard, which is a problem for a platformer that relies on heavy precision.
I do like Starshot's quirky world and vibe, but the gameplay just wasn't up there.
Starshot controls like piss and does his triple jump by holding the jump button not by consecutive presses which makes timing jumps very akward alongside his full trottle acceleration and bad traction.
Then there's the level design which made zero sense to me and I pretty much got tired of running back and forth trying to figure out what to do. You have no iframes so enemies hit until you either manage to jump away or get pushed down a pitfall.
I have some fond memories of this game when it came out back in the 90's, but sadly some memories are better off preserved.