Starfall Squadron Review

Pirates are attacking an orbital base, and it is up to you and your fighter squadron to hold the base until reinforcements arrive. Success comes down to you and your reflexes against waves of enemy fighters. Hardly an original concept, but it can be an entertaining one, as it is brought to the hand-held world by Shatter Point Studios’ in Starfall Squadron.

In the beginning, I was charmed by the game’s deliberately rough font style, and simplistic menus, though some of the game’s flaws had already become apparent. The game only has two modes, “Challenge”, and “Survival”, which play more-or-less identically in almost every way but the end goal, with no appreciable variation in difficulty. In Challenge mode you attempt to beat the timer until help arrives. In survival mode you simply hold out as long as you can neither mode, unfortunately translates into a real campaign. Okay, I can live without a true campaign, but what I can’t live with is icons overlapping in the setup screen to set up challenge mode. On the other hand, I found the use of a synthesized female voice to read out the tutorial as somewhat endearing, as it sounds better suited for electronic dance music. Overall, the production values in the early game were initially pretty hit or miss. Unfortunately, much about Starfall Squadron heads downhill from there.

I play a round of challenge mode, and discover that unless you turn off the help text through an in-game menu, a good half of your view is blocked by massive text, and further handicapped by controls that don’t fully respond as they should. I very narrowly scrape by to victory.

That’s it? I think to myself. Two squadrons of fighters that can be killed in a single hit? While admittedly the enemy is just as weak, there’s no sign of additional classes of ships, or of anything I might call “tactics”, beyond “kill everything in sight”. There’s no power ups, no boosts, no additional classes of ships, simply two squadrons of fighters that become one if you accidentally click them when they’re too close together.

Disappointed, I switch over to Survival mode, and it’s more of the same, only without a countdown to victory. Both modes include an escalating difficulty, and controls to manipulate the speed of battle.

The game’s rather well-thought out technical design fails to make up for its non-existent story and so-so graphics, as there’s very little to hold your actual interest beyond waves of enemies (and even that begins to wear thin after a time). My patience with endless waves of enemies was further strained by controls that often felt sluggish and unresponsive, sometimes requiring me to repeat what I had done in order to get my squadrons to behave as I wanted. What’s more, the game is far from technically flawless. Though it didn’t run too terribly on my Samsung Galaxy S3, it did repeatedly crash whenever I had any apps open in the background (and a few times when I didn’t). Also, it often caused my device to overheat. Additionally, on some devices, there has been an issue of icons and images overlapping, which I wasn’t terribly impressed by, though I’m hoping, for the developers sake, that that was caused by having to compress things for smaller screens. While some of these complaints were addressed by the latest patch, others were not. The attempt to fix some of these issues, however, gives me some hope, as I’m fairly certain every gamer has encountered at least one game that the developer refused to patch.

Beyond these pitfalls, Starfall Squadron is relatively well put together, and charming, if very simplistic. Starfall Squadron performs well as an arcade game for casual players because it doesn’t offer up anything like punishing defeats resource management or anything else resembling nuance and depth. While not an ideal game for hardcore gamers, the casual set and gamers on the go looking for an easy and quick distraction, will find just that.