Project Starship X Review

Project Starship X is a typical shoot’em up, or shmup if you will, where players will navigate difficult areas filled with enemies and their projectiles coming from every possible angle. Once you’ve survived the level, you need to take down the level’s boss. Each boss has multiple phases, however, if you keep shooting, their health bar drains at a reasonable speed.

In order to stand out from most shmups, Project Starship X features a dash mechanic required to survive every onslaught. The game will warn you as to where the enemies and projectiles will be coming from, giving you a fraction of a second to get ready to dash. As with other shmups, you can pick up additional firepower for even more bullet hell.

When you first start the game, you’ll be able to choose from four characters, although two of them need to be unlocked. Each character and their ship have unique skills and abilities that make them stand out from one another. For example, Garrett’s ship is well-balanced whereas Johnson’s spaceship is a bit slower but can withstand more damage before exploding.

Killing enemies rewards players with coins that can be used in the game’s shop to purchase power-ups. The shop will appear after certain levels. It’s a bit unfortunate that a shop cannot be accessed at a player’s discretion after each level, but it’s better than nothing. There’s also a bit of gameplay variety as on some levels, you’ll see your ship change and instead of dashing, you’ll need to jump. This comes without warning or explanation so it’s a bit frustrating.

If you’ve conquered the standard default game mode, Project Starship X offers a bevy of additional modes to tackle. You can attempt Hardcore and Ultra Hardcore difficulties, Boss Rush, and Chaos mode where the game will spawn whatever, whenever. There’s also unlockable Mad Events that will remix the action.

While the dash mechanics is pretty neat and increases the game’s intensity, they clearly overdid it. Seriously. While you can dash through enemy projectiles to avoid damage, you also need to dash to kill stunned enemies, pick up items/power-ups, buy items at the shop, and exit the shop. Like why? It’s fun to use to dodge enemies and their projectiles, but picking up things shouldn’t require a dash. And since you can only dash forward, if you miss a power-up, too bad. Even if you try to dash to the left or right, you’ll end up dashing upwards in a diagonal direction. The problem with this is that you can often dash into enemies, projectiles, or environmental hazards.

The game has a great, colorful 16-bit pixelated aesthetic. However, the HUD is a clusterfuck of a mess and players lose some space and visibility because of the cluttered HUD on each side of the screen. Given how intense things can become, players won’t care nor have time to check the HUD; aside from catching a glimpse of how many lives they have left. Had they removed the useless HUD and indicate health/lives more subtly, the game would’ve been more enjoyable. The soundtrack is an enjoyable chiptune score to accompany you during the on-screen action. It reminded me of classic NES games such as Mega Man or even Vice Project DOOM. Definitely worth a listen.

Fans of the shmup genre will have a blast with Project Starship X. It’s one of the more challenging and intense shoot’em up available right now. Dashing requires quick thinking and boss battles are overall well-balanced. The game does have a few annoying quirks like over usage of dashing and also the fact that you can only dash forward can be frustrating, and the messy HUD gives players a narrow view of things, but once you get used to it, it’s a blood-pumping intense shmup where one mistake can be costly. Newcomers to the genre might want to skip this, but diehard fans will have a blast. Definitely worth your time and money.