Star Shift Rebellion

Alright. [i]Star Shift Rebellion[/i] is done and dusted. I literally clapped as the credits rolled. I realize this might be recency bias, but I can’t think of a more epic adventure I’ve played outside of the Baldur’s Gate games and Witcher 3, at the moment. It has a definite coolness factor, has a complicated story that never loses its way, and despite being a RPGMaker style game, holy hell was there some insane levels of diversity in set pieces and cut scenes throughout. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3171974153 You play as rebels from the ORC (lol), an organization dedicated to fighting against a totalitarian government who largely controls all the known universe, or seeks to do so. Your group of party members will grow to seven members. Not long after, you will take control of a second party of (eventually) seven rebels, this time filled with Canites (an intelligent dog people with their own nation). Your Canite group will be all dogs with a fox and a couple dog robots. Your first group will include terrans (humans), an android, cyborgs, and an intelligent rock person. Following along so far? Because actually, you’ll have a third party of three characters that operates exclusively in cyberspace. However, one of those characters is also in your ORC party. Your party members aren't interchangeable, and this is ideal as you really start to grow attached to each of them as they are. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3171974731 As you progress, the story starts to reveal all its branching paths, that all tie back to the main overarching story, which is attempting to prevent a disaster that comes about due to the callous manipulation of both time and space. Time travel is a core story element, and honestly, it’s done to perfection. I really kind of marvel at how the writer was able to keep everything sorted out, storywise. It would’ve been very easy to lose track of things, but instead, it’s presented in an intelligent, concise, and easy to follow manner. This game features a lot of gameplay mechanics. The core of your party exploration and battles is very much JRPG. Free roam with classic showdown style turn based battles. There are however also ship battles, and these are set up as turn based grid combat arenas. The game features a cool upgrade system where, instead of leveling up, your characters earn knowledge points (xp), which can be spent on a variety of skill trees. There is a racial ability tree (which will have on or two skills depending on the race), a class ability tree, and several universal skill trees for organic characters (such as offense, defense, healing) and robotic characters (such as mods and subsystems). You also have a familiar equipment menu with armor, weapons, mods, and consumables. So, I’ve played plenty of great looking JRPGs. [i]Star Shift Rebellion[/i] rivals all of them. It’s more low poly and ofttimes grainy, but this game offers so many amazing looking setpieces. It’s a screen archer’s dream really. Level design is also flawless. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3171974429 The soundtrack is similarly awesome. My wife walked by while I was playing and said it sounded like a 1980s sci-fi movie soundtrack. I agree. It’s evocative and just plain cool. In fact, I’d argue that the game in general carries that 1980s sci-fi vibe. It’s not cheesy, but it definitely has a sort of 1980s sensibility, and if somebody told me this game was based on a television mini series or a couple movies, I wouldn’t be surprised. This is a story and vision that would translate immaculately to television or the big screen. I’ve really just scratched the surface of what this game offers here. It’s kinda mind blowing how much varied and focused content is packed into this game. I played this on the Steam Deck. I did have a couple performance issues which are detailed in the game’s forum, but the developers were Johnny on the Spot. They addressed everything quickly and with professionalism, going so far as to literally rewrite code immediately to try to fix an issue. Beyond that, it was a seamless experience on the Deck, and I’d consider it to be worthy of Playable or Verified status. Battery life was over three hours for me. Truly, this was one of the most impressive games I’ve played. [b]I received this license via my Robilar’s Reviews curator[/b], but I don’t really see how anyone could argue against the $7.99 price point. It took me nearly thirteen hours to roll credits, the very very very small development team is super responsive, the game is chock full of excellent content, and it’s really the benchmark for a truly stellar indie experience. Definitely play this one. 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I was a big fan of the original Star Shift Demo and I enjoyed the Origins release. Now this game is the second in the storyline right after Origins. It's a very well put together sci-fi story that reminds me of a mix of Final Fantasy in the 90's on super-nintendo with Mass Effect style themes and futuristic battles involving solar systems and aliens and diverse civilizations. There's also well-executed story significant tactical battles as well, which you don't see that often thrown in the mix. The music is very unique and good. The customization from the skill trees is massive and even bigger than the prior game Origins. Really it's a masterpiece of its genre. Music 10/10 Story 10/10 Artwork 9.5/10 Gameplay Experience 9.2/10 This is my opinion. I'm looking forward to the future releases!

Pros: - Very well written science fiction story. It's got conspiracy, intrigue, time travel, space politics, tragic backstories, and neat characters. - 7 character party at once in battle [you almost never see that many in rpg games], somehow they've managed to pull it off here. There's also a total of 14 playable characters (or more?) I lost count. - A lot of customization choices with the skill trees, even compared to the previous game, you can specialize your characters any way you want and there's a lot of combinations. - Some tactical battles are thrown in, so it isn't only regular turn based battles either. - Some really cool cut-scenes. - The combat is fun and fast paced, can be challenging at times Cons: - It's kind of short. Around 10-15 hours I'd estimate. It ends just when it feels like it's warming up. We need more Star Shift. And we're in luck, 2024 looks like a Star Shift Marathon year. Looking forward to Freelancers and Legacy.

Star Shift Rebellion is a large RPG which reminds me of Phantasy Star II. The story is interesting. The worlds are beautiful and the background music is superb.

Knuffiges Weltraum RPG mit fetzigen Kampfeinlagen. Super Story mit echter SciFi Atmosphäre. Die Teammitglieder können mit geradezu üppigen Skillsets gelevelt und abgestimmt werden. Es wird zwar bisl wenig erklärt, aber erfahrene RPG Liebhaber kommen klar damit. Die Grafik ist im Japan-Manga Style gehalten. Etwas typisch für "RPG Gamemaker Spiele". Stört aber nicht. Ist wie gesagt ganz knuffig. Der kostenlose Vorgänger Star Shift Origins kann vorab gespielt werden. Zwar kein Muss aber als Einstimmung in die Welt von Star Shift ganz gut. Der echte Knallerpreis rundet das ganze ab. Also zugreifen. Ich freue mich schon auf den nächsten Teil.

In two minds about this title so far. One one hand the story seems good, the characters are unique and interesting, the world seems engaging and reminds me of stories featured in Gundam, Red Alert, Cowboy Bebop etc. On the other, the game is VERY slow pace. I love games that take their time, unfold slowly or allow you to enjoy a new element one at a time, so this isn't always a bad thing, but when the tactical battles involving vehicles are slower on this PC game than when I run an old Fire emblem game off my phone, there is a problem. It grinds the flow of the game to a halt. I am all for harking back to other titles (Any Final Fantasy fans will be happy here), but that doesn't mean that you can't improve the speed, intuitiveness or restrictions of these old designs. Overall, I would love to delve further into this game, and hopefully will get the chance, but I cant see myself getting invested without some quality of life improvements to help smooth it out. Given how story driven it is, just having an auto button for the conversations for example would help immensely. Will check back on it periodically anyway and see how it develops. Would I recommend this game? It would seriously come down to how much you like playing older games, and how much time you have to play. Maybe there are reasons as to why these design choices were made, or there were restrictions on the developers, both things I can fully understand. If its simply that they wanted the game to feel like it sat amongst some of the classics of the genre though, that shouldn't mean in my opinion that players need to put up with the same issues games were throwing at us 30 years ago.

Star Shift is honest to god my favorite sci-fi series. It's a genre I've never been able to get into but something about the world, gameplay and characters really absorb me into this universe. And this is my favorite game from this dev yet.

Tribute to classic JRPGs, very solid game adding to story of Star Shift Universe. Story holds game well (it is space opera with few interesting twists), battles are fast with a bit uneven spike (I found boss fight easy, compared to some story fights before). Game is quite linear, giving you ca 20 hours of fun. Recommended if you like old fashioned JRPG.

i never expected this to be soooo good. don't usually leave reviews but man i had to for this one.