StarDrone, from Beatshapers, is an interesting sort of game, a bit outside the mainstream and hard to classify. What you need to do is guide your character through a maze of objects, which you must either collect, destroy or avoid. There are stars to fly through that will boost your score and give you a power boost, comet rush mode, so that you can then smash evil G-noids without damage. There are many devices that help you move including boost pads, zip stripes (sort of like magnetic tracks), beacons which help change your direction and assorted powerups for magnet, berserk, invisibility, etc.
The game is also, frustratingly hard at times. So hard that, just to taunt you into tossing your controller through your TV I imagine, they have an Epic Fail achievement for failing to pass a level on twenty attempts. Jerks. It seems they knew that people would fail a lot.
I don’t generally like my games to be 75% frustration and 25% enjoyment and this game is just about at that level with me after only 25 levels or so. I have absolutely no interest in going back to finish it because the objectives on some levels are so poorly laid out that you will wander around for far too long trying to determine what it is you are expected to do. Yes, they give you an objective at the beginning and some are quite clear - destroy all the enemies - while others are far more obtuse - cross the finish line - OK, where is the blasted finish line?
And this is my frustration level with the Dualshock 3. I cannot even begin to fathom how anger-inducing controls would be to use with the Playstation Move, nor can I even imagine why you would want a game like this with those controls.
185 days ago
