At a glance...

StarDrone review

I think it's fair to say that games have, in general, become easier over the years. That is, playing games through to completion on their default difficulty level, without changing options or engaging in dedicated "challenge" modes, essentially the regular playthrough, is now something most gamers can achieve. This has partly come about with the widening interest in video gaming, drawing in many people who just wouldn't put up with dying endlessly, or dealing with a limited lives count which would put you back to the start if you failed too often. People don't want games to be easy, but if you've put down £40 for a game you at least want to see half of what you paid for. However, for some people, that was a core part of the gameplay; the challenge of having to succeed or it's all over, a mentality born out of arcade games who had an interest in killing you off quickly so you'd put more money into the machine. Recent indie games such as the BIT.Trip series or Super Meat Boy have risen to fill that gap, and please those masochistic gamers.

StarDrone is a game that also tries to uphold the idea that a game should be challenging, without being quite as extreme as the aforementioned games and as a result, its early levels are actually fairly friendly. The game could best be described as a cross between pinball and PixelJunk Eden. Like the former in that the spaceship you're in charge of will keep on moving and bounces off walls, sometimes at tremendous speed. But you do not control the spaceship directly, and instead have the ability to use a grapple and cling on points, swinging in a circle like your character in PixelJunk Eden. However, unlike Eden you have to do this on the fly, without the time to ponder your next move, making it a much greater test of your reflexes. Sometimes you use these points to simply change the direction of your never-ending travel, and at other times you use them to spin around and collect items, some of which are essential for completing a level.

Each level has its own goal, which might be to activate all the stars in the map, or collect all the pieces to unlock an exit. Completing these in the shortest time you can is essential for competing on the online leaderboards. Sometimes it's a bit too frustrating when the only way of making more progress is to learn a perfect route through a level and play again and again until you achieve a score you're satisfied with. Some levels, however, have more variation in approach, allowing for more interesting and unexpected leaderboard battles.

It's a curiously mixed bag of levels in terms of objectives and the number of ways to conquer them, and the same is true of the difficulty. We've already discussed the fact that StarDrone is a game that's a bit more on the challenging side of things, but unfortunately it doesn't quite get the ramp up in difficulty quite right. While the later levels are generally harder, there seem to be some levels which are surprisingly easily (or I was very lucky), and some levels which are notoriously hard. Thankfully you don't need to complete every level before you can unlock the next, although eventually any gaps will catch up with you. This will provoke in you the desire to succeed in every level, resulting in you restarting over and over again until you get things right. In the early missions you'll be unlikely to fail, and it gives you time to get to know the controls, but later on there are an increasing number of points where death is instant and likely. And every time you die it's a return to the start of the level.

This would be incredibly annoying if it wasn't for the fact that StarDrone is actually a lot of fun. Sure, it can be frustrating, particularly on those infuriating levels which seemed designed for those who enjoy dying. But the way you can flow through levels, and the game's ability to draw on your inner sense of "I'm sure I could do it if I tried" results in a desire to take up the challenge, play the levels over and over again, and get them right. The satisfaction of finally completing a difficult level, and the wonderful little jingle that accompanies every success, makes all those retries worthwhile. Especially if it's going to result in beating your friends on the leaderboard.

Thankfully most of the difficulty comes from the obstacles on the levels rather than from using the controls. The game supports a regular DualShock 3 controller, allowing you to use either analogue stick to point at whichever grapple point you want to cling on to, or you can use the PlayStation Move controller to point directly at those same points. While the game is perfectly usable and still enjoyable using the ordinary pad, it does become noticeably more engaging, and generally more accurate (and hence less frustrating) when using the Move's pointer ability. While it is well implemented, it may not quite be a reason to pick up (and presumably pay for) Move, but StarDrone certainly benefits from it, and another reason to use the motion controller is always welcome.

StarDrone's presentation feels a little dated, but it still has some pretty visuals. A range of graphical effects are used during gameplay, and manage not to get in the way of the, sometimes rather frantic, action. The little audio cues, including the success and failure music, add to the atmosphere of the game which can often be tense. Beatshapers have done well as an independent studio, whose recent work is mostly on games under the PlayStation Minis banner, to give us a title worthy of a full PSN release at a very reasonable £6.29.

While StarDrone may not have gained the hip indie appeal of BIT.Trip or Super Meat Boy, it's certainly not a game that should be slipping off your radar. Its 53 levels are a bit inconsistent in difficulty, but their overall challenge should be enough to appeal to those who like to try again and again to succeed, while the rest of us will still be drawn in to this mentality thanks to the addictive nature of StarDrone.

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