Starlaxis Supernova Edition

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.

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RNG in boss fights? No thanks. Restart upon restart even if you do perfect runs and beat the opposition but still fail due to reason X. This one is for people who like their games soft and squishy until difficulty suddenly spikes unfairly and it is expected to grind until you succeed.

Looks good but execution is poor. Only worth it for genre enthusiasts or on heavy discount.

The idea of combining Tetris with the strategy genre is creative, however, the execution is very unimaginative.
The visual and acoustic parts of the game is plain, the game play is very tendious, and the story is forgettable (although I have not finished it yet).
Moreover, it crashes.

it's not a bad game. A mix of fast strategy and decisions, puzzle and luck. Visuals can become annoying when scoring a keycombo or killing (it feels childish, but thats just my opinion). A nice story so far, but as usual, your enemy has always an advantage.....always. Game hangs sometimes for a little moment (especially level loading or the extra visual comment by certain actions). After a while, i get tired of it, because of the continuous disadvantages and my ships who don't do that much as the enemy. But it is fun while it lasted. Btw, played with sound off, and my own music on :-)

I think it's a good game, the art and music is very entertaining and the gameplay is well done. You have to think about your moves and plan your piece drops so you can have commands ready when you want them. It's a nice blend of strategy and puzzle.

I wanted to like this game. I wanted to wait and reserve judgement until I played a bit more of it, but I find that I really don't want to play anymore for one reason alone. Too much loading time. I'll run though a mildly accurate account of loading time.

These are the game events that occur and an estimated execution time.
Game Launch to main menu = 30 seconds.
Load game to play mode = 30 seconds.
Play game length = 240 seconds (four minutes, but this widely varies).
Game death and automatic restart loading time = 30 seconds.
Game victory loading time = 30 seconds.
Special pause time (Game pauses when you use your special move.) = 10 seconds.
Boss appearance pause time = 10 seconds.

So lets say you just want to play one quick four minute game. In your quest for your four minute game you will have to wait for loading screens and pause events for an approximate total of 2 minutes. Which means that one third of your total time in this game you will spend looking at loading screens. Obviously there are other reviewers who look upon this game with more positivity than I do, and I do see why. There is an entertaining game in here between the loading menus. I just no longer have the patience to see it revealed more fully.

Starlaxis Supernova Edition:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Starlaxis is a combination of Tetris and a game of chess set in space (I think is the best analogy that I can come up with).
I enjoy the layout of the game, 2/3 of the screen is setup like Tetris and 1/3 of a horizontal map which shows you where your vessel is as well as your enemies and other obstacles like asteroids. This game will get your brain going, let me tell you!

Letters, numbers and arrow cubes will drop (you will be able to rotate numbers from 1 to 4 for example) and you will have to get combinations to move your craft up/down or right/left, get armour and shoot your enemies as fast as you can. Also, your enemies will constantly be moving so you have to be attentive in that regards. What I really like about this game is the fact that you really have to plan your moves (in advance, like a chess game) to be able to beat your foes as fast as possible. If you actually managed to get an “A” ranking at the end of each mission you will get a fair bit of money to upgrade your spaceship.

As you progress, you will be able to get other ships and commanders to help you in your missions.
Graphics and soundtracks are decent and the game runs smoothly. The controls are easy but it will take you time to master them.

One small negative for me is the loading time between missions, it is a bit slow.

For $5.94, your brain will have a work out and you will have a lot of fun.

Positives:
~~~~~~~~

- Challenging
- Fun to play
- Achievements
- Trading Cards
- Well structure idea

Negatives:
~~~~~~~~

- Loading is a bit slow between mission

Money well spent! A must have.

9/10

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I know that I'm going to play this a lot. Only quirk are the loading screens... wtf is going on? I'm on ssd and the loading is anoying... FPS is great though, which is needed for those fast puzzle games!

Feb 15 update... Load times are vastly better, so much so all complaints noted in other reviews should be rendered obsolete.