Houston, We Have a Problem | Starlight Inception Review

Starlight Inception is a space flight simulator that makes its way into the handheld gaming scene with the PlayStation Vita. Crowd-funded through a Kickstarter campaign, Starlight Inception promises great space combat and a solid return to the once popular genre, but lackluster presentation, dreadful visuals,  and a poorly conceived plot destroy any positive idea that is presented throughout any part of the game.

You’ll play as a mute pilot helping to fight off enemies in space, but that’s basically all the background you’ll get for your character. He isn’t special, there isn’t any real motivation for him, and there isn’t any relationship with any other person that is created to create any drama or sense of belonging. There are 10 different missions that will span about 10 to 20 minutes each in campaign mode, a flight sim/tower defense mode called fly patrol, as well as a bare-bones multiplayer mode that rarely has a soul in its lobbies.

One of the first aspects of Starlight Inception you may notice is its obviously poor visuals. Almost everything is extremely low-res; for example, character models look straight out of an early PS2 game, and the lack of any sort of animation to cutscenes makes staring at the static screens provided as boring as the story they’re trying to tell. In-game flying shows off a highly pixelated spaced filled with blurry ships, draw distance limitations, and simple renders of moons and planet surfaces. Creating a cool and interesting world around space is already hard enough, and limiting itself by presenting everything in such bare, uninteresting ways makes Starlight Inception boring to look at.

Environments – and pretty much everything else – lack any form of quality

At certain points in the game, I could barely make out different environments from one another. One mission has you fly into a giant asteroid and navigate through small caverns, but the game’s resolution and detail is so low and poor that I couldn’t make out an opening from a wall, which ended in several frustrating restarts at checkpoints. Another mission takes place in a nuke’d Chicago, where the decision to create an almost Superman 64 mist throughout the city makes navigation nearly impossible, because it’s hard to differentiate one part of the city from another. These were the worst examples I could recall from my play time, but Starlight Inception features many of these moments that create so much unnecessary frustration that it made enjoying the game hard from the get-go.

The actual flying is pretty decent, and the combat works well enough to be competent, but each mission is filled with almost identical enemies that require little to no strategy to defeat. Instead of presenting big battles against full squadrons of enemies, you’ll be constricted to just about four to eight enemies at a time, with each only requiring a few blaster hits to destroy. Unfortunately, there isn’t much difficulty that builds, so each flight is a breeze and becomes quite mundane, which especially becomes the case when nearing the end of the game.

When first sitting down for Starlight Inception, I was admittedly intrigued by the opening cinematic which set up the history leading up to the game’s plot, but any sort of promise was quickly stricken away as soon as the real game started. Plot is cheesy, one-dimensional, and it can make little sense at times. When a war is spanning across the galaxy, it’s a little odd that it’s called World War IV, seeing as how the war is spanning to more than just earth. Voice acting is mostly dull and doesn’t help the weak dialogue, and every turn is predictable.

Static scenes of dialogue don’t help sell the already poor story

Starlight Inception shows signs of great potential, but ultimately its own ambition is both its strength and weakness. Instead of focusing on polishing the gameplay, more focus was put into attempting to create a story and universe that just isn’t interesting or original. The most frustrating aspect about Starlight Inception is that there is definitely something worthwhile behind all the mess, and perhaps with more development time to focus on gameplay first may have ended with a much more polished and worthwhile product; instead, we’re given a hastily developed product that kills its potential with its own ambition.

While Starlight Inception is the only space flight sim available on Vita, that doesn’t mean it’s worth your time. If you need to get your fix for a space flight sim, it may be best to bust out old floppy discs to play a classic like Tie Fighter.

This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation Vita version of the game Starlight Inception by Escape Hatch Entertainment.