Starborn Demo

Shooting alien ships out in space is one of the oldest themes in video games, dating back to the legendary Space Invaders. Over the years, shoot ‘em ups have become a lot more dynamic and challenging, especially after the side-scrolling backgrounds were introduced in the industry. In essence, the genre is characterized by a high difficulty level and flashy visual effects, which make the experience that much more exciting.

Starborn is a shoot ‘em up with some grand ideas at its core, which is why it’s such a shame that none of them made into the actual game. In fact, the demo at hand is hardly playable and most certainly not enjoyable, mainly because it features so many flaws and inconveniences to ruin your fun and make the experience a tad too annoying to be worth the bother.

The underlying concept is the same as in all the other shoot ‘em ups of this kind, so originality was not on the menu anyway. However, while you do not necessarily need an original idea in order to make something fun, the game itself has to feature some attractive elements to keep the players engaged. In this case, all you do is move around and avoid the enemy lasers, because there’s not even too much point in shooting back.

The gameplay is probably the most important element in a shoot ‘em up like this, yet the developers did not seem to work too much on it. In fact, there are many mistakes and annoyances clearly visible from the first couple of seconds, like the fact that some turrets are impossible to shoot without crashing, but you cannot get past them unless they are destroyed.

Many other problems become apparent immediately, such as the total absence of a HUD. Since it looks like the ship has some kind of shield that protects it from a few bullets, it would come in handy to see how much damage you’ve taken so far. Even if this is technically a demo and nothing more, there are logo cutscenes longer than the game at hand.

All things considered, Starborn features nothing that could make you think it’s worth a shot. The actual shooting is dull and pointless, the enemies are terrible, the level design is deplorable, and it’s too short to be any fun anyway.