REVIEW : Stellatum (PS5)
Stellatum is the latest addition to the PS5 Shooter big list and is available through Satur Games. As always, the story of this type of game is as thin as paper, but at least in the console port, you have to face different races of aliens while you’re left to protect yourself.
This is a combination of two shoots, a twin-stick and a vertical scroll. However, scrolling down the background uses a twin-stick shooter’s typical left stick control system and right aim control system. If there is no scrolling background, it will be an arena shooter where all enemies appear from above.
It’s one of the few barrage games dealing with stories, and it’s a relatively good story told through an artistic and strangely quiet story panel. Stellatum is also rocking things by offering a standalone campaign mode that tells the story and all secondary arena modes for survival. Things get even deeper when you enter the game.
The ship has eight nodes and can be fitted with various parts such as engines, power mods, primary and secondary weapons, shields and more. These items can be created by unlocking the blueprints and collecting raw materials from enemy ships and asteroids destroyed during the game.
Ironically, Stellatum plays like an asteroid game. Attach the weapon to the left stick and link it to the right to give the game a twin-stick shooter feel, even when you’re firing a gun. Enemies enter the screen in a predictable and reproducible rattling pattern and must constantly move you to avoid the overwhelming amount of bullets that are relentlessly chasing you. There is a challenging combination of enemy ships and environmental hazards like asteroids, and the background layer is hard to see. Some you can skim while others are at the same level. There are also structures like barricades and space stations, with multiple turrets that track movement and create confusion.
The game doesn’t make a great first impression, and it’s something you need to go through if you want to get good. When you start, your ship’s weapons are messy, and the game’s visual style is very detailed but not exactly exciting. There is a lot of gray there, and the little ship and the little sphere look flat as if they had nothing to do with the background. You may feel like you are playing an Adobe Flash game because they are not. And even without a rotation and thrust control system, some controls have heavy inertia and make the game feel like an asteroid. At first, it feels like it’s floating, like firing a pixel-sized bullet at a large enemy army. At this point, the game commits another guilt.
So I didn’t feel at all for the first few hours of using this game, but something clicked. This is thanks to the game upgrade system. This part of the game also makes a bad first impression before I overwhelm you with praise. To upgrade your weapon, first get a blueprint (used to complete the main story level), then a component found in space, or a shiny fall that will fall when an enemy is destroyed. Build your weapon using the components you purchased from the dot “Materia”. This is a rather long system and is not supported by the misleading controls used on the upgrade screen. Given that the
blueprint drops aren’t random. In most cases, it’s very clear which is right and isn’t; the overly complex nature of the upgrade system is especially lacking in components and materials. If there is nothing to do, it is puzzling. Make them. It’s as if the risk and reward mechanism is completely incorrect. But The game becomes exciting once you apply the upgrade and start adding it to your arsenal. There is a large volley of alien shots in between and around. The screen is often full of bullets, so it’s a big deal, but with a combination of three weapons: lasers, missiles, and traditional guns, fire is great.
This is especially true if you can get a good combination of weapons that do damage and give a little visual stimulus.
It often comes down to your powerful firepower meeting them, and everything becomes very dynamic as you can destroy you and their bullets.
The game is suitable for scroll space shooters. Great levels of detail and layered backgrounds scroll through, but PS5 frame rates range from poor to unacceptable. At the tough moments of the battle, the game freezes, and after a second, my ship reappears where it was based on the movement of my sticks. It can’t happen in such a busy game. It’s not happening much here. There’s certainly nothing PS5 should handle, so you can only guess that this is a non-optimized port to the console.
Stellatum isn’t fun, at least for me. There’s nothing here that the other 12 Space Shooters haven’t improved. I was visually and tactically interested in the RPG elements of shipbuilding and customization, but not enough to withstand the nasty user interface. The action is sometimes dazzling and has all sorts of crazy special effects, but when the game starts to get to its best, performance drops unplayable and causes unjust death. Mastering the first 10 levels was a daunting task, but you won’t go through all 80 levels unless both gameplay and the user interface come with extensive performance patches. The game has a co-op mode, but sharing experiences don’t do anything fun and can put more pressure on games that can hardly run correctly on the PS5. Stellatum may have been one of the best shooters on PS5 since RType. Here are many great concepts with great presentations of high-quality music and detailed graphics.
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