STAR-BOX: RPG Adventures in Space

Ok so this game is quirky, it is fun, and it is definitely different. It is an A-RPG at it's core, with a story, albeit short at the moment. I do recommend you give this game a shot, if you had fun with other ARPG's, even Binding of Isaac fans could really get into this, altough it has more in terms of items, and managing things. I guess I will do the standard Pros and Cons for people here. . . Pros: 1: Game has fun old-school style graphics (I enjoy at least, not everyone's cup of tea I understand though) 2: You control a starship and crew, with mechs to help you in battle if you choose 3: Action-RPG that rewards skill, as opposed to just rewarding grinding as many turned based RPG's do (This is not turned based obviously being an ARPG 4: Many upgrades for yourself, and upgrades for your mechs 5: You can board enemy ships, to take them as your own, or buy a better ship if you want instead 6: You can choose to play as a fighter or a commander, either going in and leveling while killing, or letting mechs do the work and staying in the back 7: The price of this game is very low, and IMHO you will get your money's worth of hours of fun 8: Walking around areas, using the action key, you find genetic material or download data or find parts to upgrade mechs all space stations and stuff. Stuff that looks like part of the scenery, actually holds value, which I find endearing. It doesn't stick out, and scream "COME GET ME." You have to use your brain on this one folks. Cons: 1: There are some bugs, although the developer responded FAST on the boards, then patched some problems same day. 2: The resolutions are a bit funky, and you must restart the game for them to take effect, some of them cause the game to be half off the screen, at least on my monitor. 3: The controls are a bit wonky as well, as how you move is very basic, 4 directions only for facing, can't fire in diagonal, and to fire you push numbers 1 thru 4, while using the WASD to move, is very hard on the fingers. (Can use numpad to move to make it a lot easier, not sure if you can rebind firing keys, as that would be very handy) 4: Taking Damage from enemies can be somewhat delayed / non-informative. They fire 4 or 5 shots at you, and each does 400 damage, and you die near instantly before being able to react. 5: From what I can tell, there is not information when killing an enemy on experience earned, or how far from a level you are, or what is in those brown sacks they drop that you pick up. I assume it is credits, but it gives no information. All in all, this game is a good buy, and the developer has already commented that he is looking into adding the ability to build your own space station in the game. Things like that, are so unique to a game like this, and I love that he is considering it, and not just going and doing the same tropes that 3/4's of the developers do nowadays.

While the actual gameplay seems like it could be fairly decent, it is ruined by the god-awful user experience. Every single part of the UI is as bare bones as you can get, no polish whatsoever, and chalk full of bugs. Even simple things like fullscreen vs. windowed mode is pretty broken. For example, when you die in windowed mode, the game goes back to fullscreen mode until you change it again. Also, in less than an hour of play time, I've experienced 3 crashes due to some mouse script the game is running. And why on Earth is the game "always on top" of other windows?! Hopefully the dev will one day see that user experience is extremely important and fix all the issues and polish the UI, as the game really might be something worth playing. Until then, however, it is very difficult to reccomend this game... to anyone.

So this game could be a lost gem in the retro gaming world but due to ♥♥♥♥♥♥ programming it's not. The game is actually really fun, you travel around space, beat some aliens and other opponents, completing various missions, buy new spaceships ect. ect. it could be a very fun game if there was no darkside. The darkside of the game is that the programming is really bad and here is why: - The mouse programming ( which is absolutly not needed in this game) keeps the game crashing over and over again. Till you Figured out that keeping the mous on the middle of the screen solves the problem. - THe resolution options of the game dont work properly. If you change the resolution the screen gets of center so you cant see things like health or shield - Sometimes for no reason you cant board spacestations or planets. The game keeps you on your ship and you can try it over and over again with no chance to broad anything - Sometimes the game gets stuck in a loop of spaceshipfights. That actually happend only once and leaded me to glitch the hell out of the game. Because everytime you try to scan a space object a fight with an enemyspaceship breaksout. In my case the enemy was a puny little ship that didn't match mine in any aspect, so it took me no time to defeat it foor about 50 times, but you got always new loot from it. After that i got bored and made some missions and broke the stuck loop. So if there is any update wich would fix the problems above than it will be a gem in retro gaming but actually its not.

I don't like giving out bad reviews but after playing this for a couple of minutes I felt I should give my honest opinion. A basic RPG maker game gone wrong. Most RPG maker games are not good and this is no exception. It crashes frequently, the UI is beyond horrible. The music and sound are atrocious, thankfully there is an option to turn off the music. Sometimes it even works. However the annoying beeps that happen whenever you move over a selection in the menu apparently can't be turned off and since, for some unknown reason the game is always on top getting to the volume mixer to turn off the sound was a hassle. All that being said, the concept of the game is a solid one and if it was re-released in a proper programming language with a good UI and better sounds/music (Or at least the option to turn them off). I would be happy to purchase it again and play it through.

The game would not even start, complaining that a minimum screen resolution of 1366x768 is required. For now I'm stuck with a 4:3 monitor at 1280x1024 resolution. By sheer dumb luck I noticed a file named 1366w.txt in the game directory which led me to this thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/363510/discussions/0/537405286658273077/ With that I was able to get the game running in 1280x720 resolution and play for some time. Not really the most user friendly thing, and really should be fixed by making a small loader program to make this change for you then run the game. Beyond that, the game is okay from what I've seen so far. A little buggy and with the usual RPG maker interface annoyances. I'm okay with the price I paid for it as I got it in a bundle. I can't really recommend it for the full $10 price as it currently stands though.

I hate giving bad reviews, especially since the concept itself is interesting for this game, and there seems to be a lot of content that I just haven't gotten to yet. However, in my very brief time playing, the game has already crashed twice. The look of the game is tacky and appears incomplete, and the game plays very slowly. Even on a high performance machine, I experienced frame drops and the aforementioned crashes; even when the game isn't lagging, it still feels like I'm struggling to execute the controls I want because of the awkward mechanics. I quickly lose desire to play because of how awkward it is to even try. There are some good ideas I see, but those same ideas are better explored in other games I think. Not recommended, unless the developers patch it up and smooth out the rough edges pretty soon.

Buggy and unfinished. Never been updated

The last few patches have really improved this game to the point where I now feel I can publicly endorse it. Certainly there are a few small issues with the control system but overall this game is a little gem! Firstly it is huge! Not only do there seem to be many and varied missions, but there is also an option to fly around random space. I personally prefer this mode as every time you encounter something in space you enter your ship and get to chat with your crew. It feels as though you are a Star-Trek captain J There also seems to be a really interesting story although I’ve not played it all the way through yet as the missions for it become difficult quickly. This is not a game for those that like to be hand-held but instead makes you work things out for yourself (which I personally like). TBH I’m not even sure how you could explain everything to the user as there is so much going on, so much to buy, and so many ways to play. Definitely worth a look for such a small cost!

Having recently given up on Fortune's Tavern as a hopeless game i tried this one. I wondered long if this one works better and if i should buy it... though i see they both share the same kind of combat engine. Surely this one will work better right? No. It's terrible. And i have come to the conclusion that this game engine just isn't cut for fun action oriented gameplay. Sure you can get this to work somewhat but the fun part is just missing. Combat on ships is something that i can imagine some people love despite(or because) the sluggish way the characters move giving you a stuttering Archon -like linearity to combat. Fortune's Tavern dejavuu is very strong here. The biggest sin i think this game engine brings to the table is that it overshadows the story. You are spendng so much time on being annoyed by it that you just dont even care about the story. Yes i understand, some people like it. But i just can't as there really are WORKING action games such as Secret of Magia that does the action part right. Not going to be spending much ink on the game mechanics itself - i see others have already taken care of that. Instead i am going to just issue a general warning for action games that has this game engine underneath. Now by this i dont mean rpgmaker games generally as i have recently learn't to like a lot of more traditional rpgmaker games but this particular engine that is used on the more action oriented games is just a general disaster and i will avoid it like the plague in the future.

STAR-BOX: RPG Adventures in Space is a game that I can't recommend because: - the price is too much for it's quality (if it has one) - it is full of bugs - it crashes all the time - it doesn't deserve to get a cent - it is unplayable - it has no graphical options - the only good reason to install this game is for the trading cards