Starfighter: Eclipse — I Wish This Were Good

Starfighter: Eclipse — I wish this were better

It’s quite the writing challenge that the player is a Pilot rather than a Navigator, because Pilots, in-universe, are dumb as hell.

And the reason so many boys’ love games are from the POV of the shrinking violet, bottom, omega-male, is because these games are made for women.

(the comic definitely was)

with Abel as the viewpoint character and Cain as a totemic representation of dangerous male dominance

…i am displeased with the way it rubs their cameos in your face right off the bat, too

yes, we know this is an extension of an existing franchise, that’s the only reason we’re playing it.

it is very strange that there are some women in this too

like i was fine with just sort of forgetting women existed for the purpose of this gay man fuck game

but it’s much weirder if women exist and they 100% work in the maintenance department

the problem is that their budget and effort-allocation is…bonkers?

Music: D+ (but somehow they spent thousands on it?)

SFX: C+ (perfectly serviceable)

Writing: D (but somehow they spent thousands on it?)

Teaser Video: C (but why do you even need this?? You probably paid a thousand for this too, christ)

Sprites: D+ to B-? (Beautifully drawn, but there’s so few sprites per character that it makes it pretty goddamn hard to have a conversation. Notice how at no point do you have a back-and-forth longer than eight lines with anyone? That’s because they have too few moods and they’ll just look like cardboard cutouts if you hold the shot.)

Splashes: S-tier. More gorgeous splash pages in this 60 minute game than I’ve seen in some sixty-hour games.

Backgrounds: A-. Very nice bespoke work here.

if this were a project produced for $30k in eight months, I’d say it warrants a C+ and I might pledge to them to see what they produce in the future

but this was a project produced for $140,000, on a longer timeline, and they already had a game demo, so they already had the game engine running