Recent reviews by Vansten

EDIT - There seems to be a common misconception about "lootboxes" or "microtransactions" in this game.
When you level up and do daily objectives, you do get what appear to be lootboxes, HOWEVER this is PURELY VISUAL - The rewards you get for objectives are identical each day, and the rewards you get for leveling up are based on what level you are, not RNG.

There are only 2 things you can buy in this game.
* Gleam Club, which allows you to have extra colors, colored chat, and stops your beacons from expiring and going wild.
* Cubits, which are used in getting plots. However, you get so many from leveling up that I haven't needed to do this once

-Original Review-

Despite what others are saying, there really are no "pay to win" elements what so ever.

Yes, there an in-game store, but you already earn so much through leveling up that you will never feel the need to use it in the slightest.

Overall, its a solid game, and if your still on the fence, just ask around in the offical discord.[discord.gg]

Probably the best IO game im existance.

Starblast.io is one of those "easy to play, had to master" kind of games. It offers 4 different gamemodes in 5 different regions.

• Survival, which is a FFA type gamemode that has everyone fighting eachover.
  
• Teammode, where 3 teams work together to upgrade their base and destroy the enemies base.
  
• Deathmatch, which are quick games where everybody can choose between 2 ships to destroy eachover.
  
• And recuently added, Invasion, that has a team of 1-4 players fighting waves of NPC Aliens.
  
  As well as a massive shiptree of upgrades to pick from and master, there's always something for everybody!
  
  

Forts is a strategic game about destroying the enemy base before they destroy you.
There are currently 6 different guns you can use, 4 of which can be upgraded.

The main challenge is getting a good energy and metal income to build weapons, while also defending these generators and your main reactor.

Probably the main draw is the multiplayer. The campaign provides some challenge but isn't the main draw. That would be the multiplayer.

It's a great game if you have friends to play it with. Or if your like me and don't have any, the discord server has plenty of guys to play with.

Oh, and it has a Kickass soundtrack.

The only negative I really have with the game is the lack of effective weapons. The problem isnt the number in the game, its that rushing to get the big guns often is more effective then building smaller guns. However, these sorts of problems are to be expected from an indi-development team.

Overall, a great game to play, especially when they add workshop and mod support.

In many aspects, it is like the old Robocraft, but with a few changes. As it is set in space, it has all planes of movement, adding more challenge and situational awareness so you don't get caught from below.

You start of with 1 ship class unlocked "Rookie", and after playing enough games get access to 4 other classes, each with strengths and weaknesses.

You build ships with CPU, which limits how many parts you can put on, and gain more each level. You also have AP which is spent on cool ship ability like a blink drive, power booster, engine boosters ect.

One really good feature I like is, instead of buying parts, you unlock them by leveling + buying with Junk, and once there unlocked, you can use them and endless amount of times.

The first few games, you are likely to fail (but that doesn't matter, because almost every game has new players), but eventually, you are able to level up and cause some damage.

Overall, the game is very solid, with only a few minor bugs here and there. The devs really enjoy talking to the community on their Discord channel, and the community itself is very friendly and helpful.

EDIT: Game runs fine on different computers, so it is my own fault. As with level length, the developer states later levels are much longer. This game is good if your graphics card can handle it


TLDR: Too short, and too much lag to enjoy

The main reason I can't recommend this game is because of the way it runs. I have 8 GB of ram, with an i7 Processor (nothing special, but way above recommendation) and the game lags massively (I get around 10FPS when playing).

Of course there could be other reasons, but what bothers me is that the only option available in the option menu is to change the pre-set control schemes to mouse, keyboard or controller - no options to change quality, and no options to change the button bindings, let alone sound or anything else.

The other place it falls short on it levels. From what I've seen, the game comes with 4 levels, but if the first one is anything to go by (got up to the first boss after ~4 min, you could beat them all in 20 min if you are good.

I would only recommend this to people with good computers, who don't mind playing the same 4 levels over and over again.

If you added in more settings, especially ones to reduce quality, and more levels, I would happily give this game a thumbs up, but in its current state, I just can't do that

• Very balanced game-play - a max ship size of $1k puts an emphesis on player skill
  
• How successful you do is primarily dictated by Building Skill and Flying skill, that is, the ability to dodge and avoid stuff
  
• Great friendly community
  
• Epic Multiplayer - have up to 3 vs 3 at once
  
• MASSIVE CUSTOMIZATION - Lots of different weapons, engines and other addons makes each ship unique.

• Interface is very confusing
  
• The entire campaign mode pretty much acts as one big tutorial teaching you what everything does
  
  If you've played games like Reassembly even something like Space Engineers, then trying this game is a must!

• Get to design Air and Landships
  
• Emphasis on design - lots of things to put on vehicles, including lots of weapons!
  
• Singleplayer Campaigns that last for about 1-2 hours - enough for fun but so it doesn't drag on

• Very basic Multiplayer - as far as I've seen so far, its just single battles against one another
  
• Designing good ships can be very challenging
  
• Once you have mastered Campaign mode, may become boring
  
• Hard limit set on size of ships (can only have 120 Max Crew)

Overall, I recommend anyone who is a fan of designing deadly war machines to give it a try. It can be quite enjoyable designing a flying armada.

And to the developer, I recommend that you remove the hard limit on craw (I wanna build a death star!) and possibly work more on multiplayer to include multi-player campaigns.

EDIT: Well now it looks like they are offering downloadable content "deals". for $20, $50 and $150. The best part is, even though you would think spending $150 would be enough to make you powerful, the $150 deal doesn't even have enough ships to make 1 single decent fleet. Talk about a joke!

Lets also not forget that if you were to buy $150 worth of in-game currency and buy those ships outright, you could afford to buy twice as many ships as it's offering
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So, how can I summarise this game is 3 words? How about
PAY TO WIN

I’ve been playing this game long before it came to steam, for over 2 years now, and from what it was, the game has gone from good to bad to downright horrible. The only reason I still play is due to playing for so long that to abandon my progress would be impossible

The developers are horrible - they only add things in that benefit them financially. They never listen to the community.

The events are near impossible for anyone who doesn’t have the absolute latest tech, unless you like grinding for days on end just to win.

The BUILD TIMES are what make this game pay to win. It's worse than Clash of clans. It takes roughly 1-2 weeks to build a single end-game ship, and you need at least 5 to make a decent fleet. Your options are:

1.) Wait nearly 6 weeks MINIMUM for a single fleet of ships
or
2.) Pay over 100$ MINIMUM to instantly have that fleet

When your fleet eventually dies, you still have to wait 12-36 hours just for them to repair, per fleet. You can't repair multiple fleets, so a person who doesn’t spend money in the game can get a few days of repair in the course of half an hour.

Things is, its very easy to have someone destroy your fleet even with skill, because they recently added in ship crafting, which allows you to upgrade your ships. This makes it a “paper scissors rock” scenario, where fighting with the wrong fleet can lead to disaster, with 12 hours of repairs to you, and none to very little to your enemy.

Another small detail, THE GAME IS FULL OF CHEATERS.
There are many Chinese alliances (clans) that manage to use scripts to kill NPC fleets over and over again while they sleep, and Kixeye refuses to do anything about it because, as I said earlier, they only do things that benefit them financially.

FINAL THOUGHTS

DO NOT GET THIS GAME unless you have hundreds of dollars to spend in a game where the highest bidder wins, or unless you are very very patient