Shooting things is fun. It’s fun with guns. It’s fun with cars. It’s especially fun with spaceships. Pretty much a solid 75% of gaming involves shooting things in one way or another. It’s a visceral activity that stimulates us on a primal level. And that’s pretty much all Stellatum is. Shooting things.
Now, Stellatum has a storyline about alien spaceships and a bunch of weird happenings in space, but it’s mostly nonsensical and there’s virtually no point in paying attention to it. You’re here to blast the enemy in a linear vertical scrolling horizontally displayed field of battle. It seems fun. The spaceships are okay. The backgrounds are initially fairly pretty. But then things quickly become less satisfactory.
Stellatum involves blasting through impossible waves of ridiculous enemies to acquire parts to upgrade your ship. It’s obviously intended to be a roguelike, but it doesn’t really play like one. Individual levels are the same each time you play them, and the only things that change are item drops. Unfortunately, there aren’t nearly enough of them and the enemy fire is so dense that you’re struggling to make it through the levels. Trust me, as bad as the image is below, in motion, it’s much, much worse.
Did I mention that this is a modified twin stick shooter? Left stick to move, right stick to aim, L button to fire (not the trigger, weirdly) and R button to fire special weapons. So you have to aim, fire, and control your ship all at once, which would be fine, except that your ship is slow as all hell, runs dry on firing, and has limited special weapons. Upgrades very slowly solve these problems but it’s an utter grind. Now, usually, that’s fun, but the repetition of levels, limited variety of early weapons, and tediously designed levels make Stellatum more of a chore than anything else. Sure, eventually you can scrounge up a wild arsenal that blasts through enemies, but most players won’t be interested enough to play that long. The trailers sure make it look enticing, but the actual game is like flying spaceships through mud.
So, on top of all that, there’s the artwork. I love space scenes but Stellatum just recycles the same background, has a limited enemy repertoire, a sad, sad color palette, and makes everything way too small. The game is virtually unplayable undocked on the Switch and not much better on the big screen. I had to put on my glasses just to read the text in the hangar on a 55” TV, and that’s definitely a problem. So, the same background, level after level, sometimes with different colors, the same brown ships with barely visible tiny green health bars for the bigger ones, and the same tiny super-fast bullets that it’s nearly impossible to dodge peppering the entirety of the screen. Blech.
So, the graphics are boring, the levels are repetitive, and the music? It’s okay. It fades into the background, barely to be noticed. The variety of weapons is cool, if and when you manage to build some. But everything else is substandard at best. Even bosses are tedious with predicable, simplistic patterns and cheap shots galore. Simply surviving a level is an achievement. And even this would be forgivable if you got enough armaments fast enough. But you just don’t.
Stellatum is an example of nearly succeeding in game development. A game that by all rights could and maybe even should be good, but doesn’t manage to be fun or compelling in any way due to the design choices made by the team over at Satur Entertainment. They even managed to make the combat vaguely resemble Star Control 2, one of my personal favorite games, but sadly, a 27 year old adventure game with space combat still manages to be more fun than Stellatum. It’s just not all that fun and your $15 would best be spent elsewhere, especially if you like shmups of any kind. This is at best, a $5 title and isn’t really worth a closer look.
This review was based on a digital copy of Stellatum provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes, and was painful in both. All photos are actual screenshots from in-game play. Stellatum is also available for Steam, Xbox One and PS4, so everyone can suffer equally. Good luck, you’ll need it.