Tuesday, January 2, 2024

Project Starship (Xbox One, 2020)

Project Starship
Developed by Panda Indie Studio
Published by Eastasiasoft Limited
Released for Xbox One (2/11/2020)
Also on PC/PS4/PS5/Switch


Preface
Project Starship is a throwback shmup of the vertical-scrolling variety. This is the first release brought to an Xbox platform by Panda Indie Studio, which as far as I can tell is now going by Arabong Dev and consists of a single developer named Matteo. Project Starship originally released for PC back in 2015, but saw a revival for home consoles in 2020 thanks to publisher Eastasiasoft. As a huge fan of shmups in general, I was excited to see what this one has to offer...
 
Graphics/Presentation
The graphics in Project Starship are presented with 2D sprites with bright colors and bold outlines that are surprisingly large for a game of this variety, which works in this instance since your hitbox is only the cockpit of your ship. The pixel-art looks good for the most part, though the art on the character select screen looks more pixelated than the rest of the game. The levels in Project Starship are randomized, making each play a bit unpredictable but the background details look nice and fit in with the player/enemy sprites nicely.
 
Sound/Music
There are several voice-overs for the various power-up pickups, which are a nice throwback to the 90's era shooters that inspired it. The sound design overall feels a tad sparse and while the voice effects and player gunfire sound alright, there's no sound for enemies exploding as you blast them down which feels sort of hollow. The sound effects are also obnoxiously loud when compared to the average game sound volume so be prepared to turn the volume down when booting this one up. In order to help compensate for the lacking sound, the soundtrack is quite good,

Gameplay/Controls
Upon starting a game in Project Starship, you're given a choice between a male or female pilot (which seem to play exactly the same) and the option for either hard or easy difficulty. After this you'll be thrust right into the action, flying over a space backdrop and blasting at enemies that consist of mostly space aliens and ships. The controls are tight and responsive and you can slow down for precise dodging by holding either the B button or the right trigger

With each level being randomized, you never really know what you're going to come up against, which is part of the charm of Project Starship. It's interesting how levels are randomized each time you play, but this also means that the enemy placement can be hit or miss. There are times when you'll just fly along with no enemies in sight while the game thinks about what it's going to throw at you next, but thankfully these are short-lived and not frequent enough to be anything more than a minor complaint. As you progress further into the game, things can get real crazy with tons of stuff coming at you. Occasionally you'll come across what the game calls "Mad Events" where something crazy will happen, like a bombardment of bullets or inverting your control scheme temporarily. 
 
Gripes/Complaints
While I found Project Starship to be a fun little shooter, there are a few gripes with the game. First would be the lack of sound effects to help complement the action and the loud volume of the sounds that are in the game. Second, there are no options at all. Some screen and volume options at the very least would have been great. Some additional game modes would have went long way to give the game some replayability. This is a game where the main objective is to stay alive and rack up the biggest score possible, so it's a bummer that there aren't any online leaderboards to see how you stack up against the rest of the players out there.

Easy Gamerscore/Title Updates
Sometime in March 2023, Eastasiasoft Limited decided to add title updates to a large number of its previous releases. Project Starship was one of the games to receive updates. There were 2 updates which upgraded the available gamerscore from 1000 to 3000G. These are all just extensions of the already easy existing set, just requiring you to kill more enemies and lose more shields to rack up some easy gamerscore. Once again in January 2024 Project Starship would receive another title update to make it worth a total of 4000 gamerscore points.

Closing Thoughts
Project Starship was one of the first releases that was published by Eastasiasoft Limited I played that really showed some promise and caused me to keep an eye out for more games from the developer Panda Indie Studio (which there are several more to be covered in the future). It's a cool little game, though the time you'll spend with it will be brief and it could have really used some additional modes/options and online scoreboards.

Final Verdict: Project Starship is a solid effort at creating an old-school vertical shmup. Featuring randomly-generated stages and some good controls paired with an awesome soundtrack, the only real gripe is that the sound design is lacking. This developer would go on to make some excellent shmups, but Project Starship was a good early effort from Panda Indie Studio and is worth a look if you need a quick shmup fix or easy achievements.


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