StarPilot is a very pretty and nicely produced action game from jsmars which takes TRON bike gameplay to a new level.
In StarPilot, you control a spaceship as it jets about on a 2D plane. Much like in TRON, you leave a trail behind your ship, which is deadly to other players.
In StarPilot’s case, you need to fool your opponent to hitting your trail a few times for it to kill them.
In the game arena, a variety of powerups spawn, including Double Trails, Increased Health and a recharge for your booster to help you get out of tight spots.
Overall, StarPilot impressed me for having polished and glowing graphics, decent sound and generally nice production values. That said, the font used on the menus is very small, and although legible when close to a HDTV, it might be difficult to read on smaller standard definition sets.
Gameplaywise, there are a number of challenges which you move through, although you’ll not get far in the demo version. The first challenge has a bit of a sedate speed, and the calm music makes you feel relaxed, rather than excited. Maybe some faster music and an increase in game speed could add some thrill. The main change I’d like to see is a fixed camera control mode, so instead of the camera rotating with the player’s ship when fully zoomed out, the camera stays still, and the ship moves about on the screen. This could be added in as an extra camera mode, and would cater to retro fans who’d like it to play a little more like the original TRON. If jsmars updates with this little change, it’d really add to the playability, and would go from a thumbs up to a double thumbs up.
StarPilot is available for an easy to recommend 400 points.
This title was 400 Points at the time of writing this review but has since been reduced to 240 Points.
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Too bad the d-pad only has four buttons, but I’ll figure something out and get you that camera mode in the next update
That’s great news. Can’t wait to see how it plays from a classic perspective.
I’ll probably buy this once MS have sorted the 80072ee2 error with my marketplace.
Just let us know when the update goes live.
This is a great idea and a potentially great game but as it stands the camera is really bad, the only one that I find usable is the top down camera, the others you can’t really see what’s going on and the camera moves with your ship making it a confusing and frustrating navigation experience.
Also the top down camera is waaayyy too far away, you end up being that tiny that you can’t see what the powerups are and you can barely see what’s going on.
Also the controls aren’t sharp enough, you don’t have as much control as you should and the turning circle when not thrusting is huge, making it nigh on impossible to avoid drifting into an opponent’s trail when you are out of thrust…
If it weren’t for these issues this would be an AWESOME game, one of my favourite mini-games from Mario Party of all time expanded into a whole game? YES PLEASE!
I really hope these issues are fixed in an update, if so it will be a day one purchase for me, when my region (Australia) is finally allowed to buy Community Games.