Starboost EX is a rather laughably badly made, amateurish attempt to make a hybrid third person shooter/tower defense. Think "Sanctum", but so bad even Temu wouldn't try to sell it.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
This game has been translated from some other language into English... badly. If this was done through Google Translate, Google Translate should feel ashamed of itself. Regardless, the language in this game is broken and will put off a lot of gamers.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
We can say with great certainty that this game is not an asset flip. This is because the assets are of such poor quality that no self respecting asset creator or artist would publish them under any circumstances.
Certainly, nobody likes to see asset recycling, stock assets are intended to be used as placeholders until superior assets can be created by the developer, but when we get what's worse than either stock assets being flipped or professional assets, it's a reason for gamers to go out of their way to avoid the product.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.
The game is very badly optimised, with low framerates and janky gameplay even on a high end rig. Developers must take the time and polish their games and ensure they are optimised and will play well on any potential customers system.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
Starboost EX has the utterly unrealistic price of around $7 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
For comparison, the $7 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Elder Scrolls Online", "Mass Effect Trilogy Pack" or "Wolfenstein - The New Order". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
