This is arcade design transformed into aesthetic experience. This is a shooter made into a poem. And that sounds absurd— but, in some sense, it seems true every time I play through this one more time. This is a flight through ancient places held together by the beauty of their images and songs; modern settings torn apart by machines, humanity, ambition; all punctuated by struggle, death, and dragonfire. The pacing establishes a rhythm between the gripping and the tranquil. And the sheer artfulness of every element sometimes allows a meditative calm to emerge inside moments of intensity. There are perfect moments made from cutting through a blue sky threading a dragon’s flight through bright twisting barrages of laser fire.

And for all its poignance—which has stayed with me for twenty years now— this is as much of a video game as it is anything else. The shooting and movement is fast but graceful. The game can be demanding enough to be rewarding. And
the mechanics have enough depth to make moment to moment tactical decisions feel significant. Shooting incoming missiles out of the sky, dashing out of danger at just the right time, building up your meter and making the best use of it to survive —all that feels great. And then there are the the three dragon forms your dragon can swap between on the fly. Each embodies a trade-off between speed and damage. Any form is capable enough to clear the game, but they provide a flexibility to the play that wouldn’t be there without them. The way you bring about destruction and vengeance with a continual stream of orbs and homing lasers can be strategically satisfying and kinetically elegant and beautiful— but the explosions dotting the sky and across the earth still add up to something more than arcade gratification. The designers have, at points, somehow woven regret into the gratification. The stunning world in the background is shot through with a kind of quiet sadness.

Panzer Dragoon proved that the rail shooter could become a work of art. Zwei was the perfection of that ideal—pure, simple, strange, beautiful. And with Orta they retained the same strange magic and made it all just a little more sophisticated than they had before.

Sometimes you find a game so great that you can't quite put it into words. I've played a sparse couple of games that made me feel like that, and often times I find myself unable to write much of anything about why I like the game... about why you should play it.

Starsector is one of those games. It's just so damn amazing and there's an almost endless amount of things to do that all work together to make something truly special. For the longest time Mount and Blade: Warband was the pinnacle of sandbox RPGs for me... now I've found its successor.

Stop reading. Play Starsector.

5/5

the inclusion of the double jump is genius. it gives you a degree of freedom that makes the game super fun, because it's a jump that you have to commit to, but you can still modify your trajectory to the options the game gives you WHILE wrong decisions punish you for not having strategised adequately. every decision you make with the jump has future consequences with risks and rewards depending on what you choose to do.
including the typical GnG gameplay loop about showing you a challenge with minimal randomisation to maintain variety while setting on stone how you can complete it, it hooks you in... Simple- challenging fun!

For all the marketing Nintendo had for this I was expecting something unique to break the old formula. It would make sense considering most other Nintendo franchises have seen major evolutions but unfortunately this is more of the same although the levels are all very unique, the defining feature here is that each level has some unique gimmick to it.
I have huge gripes with Nintendo treating Mario as a franchise that has to be extremely easy, it was one of my main issues with Mario Odyssey and it continues here as well. The levels in this game are incredibly trivial and there is rarely a moment in which obstacles are compounded to create some challenging mix of different mechanics, this is probably due to the fact that the game refuses to build on something before switching to the next mechanic. What other people may like here is what I ended up dreading, that joke people make about water levels in video games being the worst because they change a mechanically solid game into something completely different happens here in nearly every level. A majority of wonder flowers result in you having to fiddle with a different control scheme or witnessing a canned event, it gets tiring fast and the random wow factor doesn't work out when the surprise is getting to play a boring minigame.
I also don't understand the purpose of badges, it feels like they were added ontop of the game towards the end of development with how I've been able to break some levels by using them. Levels aren't designed around the badges and the badges generally make the game far easier so I'd usually avoid using them. It's a great concept in theory but I really dislike the execution here, they're basically glorified cheatcodes.
The constant narration from flowers is also incredibly annoying and I don't understand why it exists, they generally make the game feel like it's bordering on baby sensory content when I'm constantly hearing the same guy make comments in the genre of ERM well that just happened!
I wish the overall structure of this game was different but it's still the same old formula, which isn't a terrible thing as the level design is still solid and it's consistently of a pretty high quality. I just think all the new things added here don't add any value and only make the game worse. It feels like when adding new stuff they prioritized the wow factor more than considering if it's actually fun or should be in the game.

ALSO WHY IS THERE A STORY WHY IS THERE SO MUCH FUCKING DIALOGUE I HAD TO SKIP SO MUCH DIALOGUE IN THIS GAME WHO CAME UP WITH THE IDEA THAT 2D MARIO WAS MISSING OUT ON A STORY LIKE WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THAT WHY DO I GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE FLOWER PEOPLE