Pixel Starships Review – Free to Wait

A big pet peeve of mine is when a mobile game port makes its way onto Steam and I fail to notice. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with a game originally released on mobile devices to market itself to a new audience on Steam. Doing so opens up a whole new market for the developers, further rewarding them for their work and introducing their games to more players.

What does bother me, however, is when these games use deceptive marketing to hide the fact that they’re repackaging a phone game.

A game originally being made for phones doesn’t immediately make it bad. In theory. Let’s be honest though, there is a world of difference in the standards of what a game is when it comes to mobile games. A completely different design culture dominates the platform and Pixel Starships is no exception to the standard mobile game design philosophy.

Do not be fooled by the Steam page’s deceptive use of videos depicting real time space battles, screenshots of turn-based JRPG-style combat, and the use of words like “spaceship construction” and “spaceship management.” I was excited for what appeared to be a Starbound-style game with a bigger focus on spaceship building. Unfortunately, the game is not at all what it appears to be.

Have you ever played Fallout Shelter? This game is Fallout Shelter, in space.

For the unfamiliar, Pixel Starships has you starting with one of three beginner ships. Ship management comes along in the form of adding little prefabricated rooms within the restricted space of the ship. These rooms all either produce some sort of resource, such as crystals, scrap or energy, or increase storage for these materials.

Your choice at the beginner is purely cosmetic. No matter what you pick, the gameplay loop will be using idle production rooms to create resources in real-time, and then spending them to build more rooms. The entire game follows the infamous “free to wait” philosophy of mobile games, and the timers for building or collecting things will rapidly approach the multiple days number as you play.

The game does its best to try and hide the fact that you’re playing a resource collection idle game with some clever coats of paint. You buy a laser, assuming it will function as a weapon since it’s in the weapon category, and it will, but it’s also a production room that creates gems to use on upgrading your ship. It will only function as an actual weapon every now and then when you get to engage in a space battle.

The PVP space battles present in the game take place against offline, botted versions of player ships. Your ship will engage another player’s ship on a 2d plane, and your entire interaction will be selecting which rooms on the enemy ship to fire at, and then waiting for the combat to end. Admittedly, I did have fun with this feature, despite how un-interactive the whole thing was, I haven’t had the chance to engage in a battle with larger ships, but I imagine there might be some form of resistance in those battles, and can probably last a long time.

The game’s microtransactions mostly come in the form of production rushing. This is a common feature in mobile games where players can spend a little bit of money to make wait times shorter. The purpose of these wait times, which progressively get longer, is to incentivize you to spend money while technically still being a free-to-play game. The game also features a gacha system, where new crewmates are pulled from loot boxes.

What confuses me most about the dev’s decision to make Pixel Starships a micro-transaction game is that they proudly display on their Steam page that the game was totally crowdfunded. The game does not need to be built around microtransactions, because the developers don’t have any money they need to make back. It is a bizarre choice to say the least to crowdfund a game and then choose to design it in a way that sacrifices player satisfaction for increased profits.

This system doesn’t reward the PVP or online nature of the game, as casual players will get bored and give up on the wait times and the more competitive will simply buy their way past the queue.

Pixel Starships isn’t completely without merit. The game is absolutely beautiful, with fantastically done pixel art for the starships, galaxies, and worlds you can explore. There is also clearly more passion put into it than your standard mobile game, though I’m afraid it might have been wasted on pretty lackluster gameplay. The game is also unfortunately not incredibly well optimized for PC, forcing you into fullscreen mode and giving you unjustifiably long-load screens.

I don’t understand how the developers managed to crowdfund a game featuring the most universally disliked mechanics in gaming. I didn’t follow the game’s startup, so its unclear to me how upfront the devs were with what the title was going to be, but the game seems to have mostly positive reviews. Maybe I’m wrong, and this is the kind of game players want? Though I couldn’t imagine why.

Pixel Starships was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Pixel Starships is available on Steam and Google Play.