Starlaxis Supernova Edition is an older game from 2015. It's a venerable 10 years old at the time of this review.
At first glance this looks like a Tetris ripoff mobile app, and it certainly has mobile app qualities, but the puzzle is a little deeper. In fact this is a game where you play through two puzzles at the same time. The Tetris game blocks that you complete turn into "moves" and actions you can take with your fighter along the bottom of the screen as you must move and attack with it, based on the blocks you free in the first puzzle. Novel idea! Is it great? Nope... we're on PC, and while this may have done amazingly well on the iPhones it seems to have been designed for... this is no Counter-Strike.
There is, however, a ridiculous amount of window dressing for what's ultimately a mobile app kind of game.
There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time.
We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. My gaming rig is not a Kindle.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
The graphics look so much like what you expect to see on a mobile phone app store... cartoony low poly ships for the cutscenes, and then it's just a basic neon 3D rendered 2D puzzle field. No awards being given for that.
The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.
This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all)?.
Regardless, for all intents and purposes Starlaxis Supernova Edition might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Starlaxis Supernova Edition has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "FLASHING TROPHY", for defeating a "Raptor" enemy in the second puzzle without getting hit by it, trivial to achieve, but less than 3 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 3 percent of players bothered playing the game for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this game to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this game? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.
That tells us people only really bought this game for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam?
Starlaxis Supernova Edition has the cash grab price of around $5 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 $5 asking price for this game could get you games like "Torchlight 2", "Mass Effect" or "Fallout: New Vegas". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
