Project Starship Review (RoverdriveX)
A quaint little game going for a specific old school Japanese arcade game aesthetic. Clearly inspired by Raiden and similar vertical shooters.
It's not terrible but it feels overall unpolished and strange. The most off-putting aspect for me was the lack of sound effects for... most things, including enemies getting hit, the majority of enemy attacks, and the player getting hit or killed (although that does have musical distortion to indicate it). Also annoying is the lack of i-frames (and/or screen clearing) after getting hit, which is what you'd expect from most games of this type, and leads to a lot of fast drainage of your health.
The game is also a bit inconsistent with its visual and audio style, with some sprites being pretty clean while others appear intentionally limited (the character art in particular), and the fact that the game has many 8-bit style sound effects and compressed voice clips despite playing modern electronic music.
I will say that the music is actually surprisingly good, one of the best aspects of the game.
Again, the game is not horrible, it's clearly someone's passion project and of course it doesn't cost much at all. It is a serviceable cheap vertical shooter. But, I can't bring myself to play it for very long. It probably should have spent more time in the oven before it was served.
The sequel, Project Starship X, looks a heck of a lot better. I might try it out at some point.