Star Story: The Horizon Escape Switch NSP Free Download

Star Story: The Horizon Escape Switch NSP Free Download Unfitgirl

Star Story The Horizon Escape Switch NSP Free Download Unfitgirl “NO FREE-TO-PLAY! NO LOOTBOXES! NO GRINDING!” proclaims the eShop trailer. Developer EvilCoGames boldly assures players that Star Story: The Horizon Escape contains “ONLY FUN!” While it’s amusing to throw tired conventions and unpopular trends under the bus, ‘fun’ is a vague descriptor. What’s fun about this turn-based RPG/text adventure? You play as Van Klik, a Star-Lord wannabe who crash lands on Horizon, a planet filled with hostile raiders and sand shrimps. You’re given an initial choice which leads you down one of three branches. The game is primarily a text adventure, with a liberal dollop of turn-based battles and crafting, and your AI companion Verdana provides occasional commentary and assistance as you meet people and uncover the secrets of the planet. Your choices fall into three categories: ‘Resolve’ (aggressive), ‘Insight’ (intelligent), or ‘Goodwill’ (friendly). Every decision made will bag you a spec point which goes into a ‘Technologies’ tree back on your ship, gradually unlocking new craftable items using scrap you find on the planet. Better gear opens up narrative options; for example, jump boots might enable you to avoid a hazard or save a travelling merchant from a gang of raiders. Points remain after dying or reaching one of the endings, so you’ll eventually max out each category regardless of your initial picks. Unfitgirl.COM SEXY GAMES

The user interface is generally clear, although everything’s a mite too small for our liking. Pleasingly, touch is fully supported, and ship-based crafting is considerably easier on the touchscreen, although things can get fiddly elsewhere. When using the Joy-Con, the left stick navigates the environment and dialogue options while the D-buttons control your inventory. Holding ‘X’ brings up tooltips and, in general, overt instruction is pleasantly absent. Having said that, the method to recharge weapons took a little time to figure out – they are fuelled by scrap and must be recharged on your ship via a toggleable button as you gather your expedition gear. The battles themselves are functional, if unremarkable. It’s all very familiar – burn/corrosion weapons do damage over time and different shields offer protection to specific attacks. The battles lack punch, though – there are none of the visceral animation or audio flourishes that make number attrition exciting in the best turn-based games. The soundtrack is inoffensive, and while the bone-based animation and steampunk aesthetic recalls Steamworld Dig, Star Story is unfortunately characterised by a lack of variety and polish. Things like mismatching fonts or the developer logo seemingly displayed in the wrong aspect ratio don’t make a good impression. Despite the trimmings, this game is really a text adventure.

JUDGING THE BOOK BY ITS COVER

Van Klik’s story of ancient artefacts, androids and aliens is told in the past tense and while the script has some fun moments, you’ll soon start playing ‘spot-the-typo’. Some sentences are simply unfinished, likely due to display errors – “I want to meet new people and make new”. The quality of the dialogue itself is inconsistent, swinging from admirably colloquial to stunted and awkward. It’s relatively entertaining the first time around, but repetition is Star Story’s biggest weakness. Following the initial branch choice, the narrative forks a further three times, splitting each run into four chapters which lead to 24 possible endings – and finding them all becomes a slog. Non-story events are somewhat randomised every run, although the game doesn’t have a huge repertoire of encounters. On top of that, the necessity to craft every consumable item means you’ll be teleporting back to your ship repeatedly to restock and recharge. A loading screen which accompanies each trip doesn’t help matters – it’s a few seconds you’ll repeat hundreds of times. For a small adventure game, Star Story gives the Switch’s internal fan a surprising workout and leaves a 2.4GB footprint. Once you’ve built up your inventory sufficiently, a complete run might take around 30 minutes, although dying will send you back to the very beginning. Fashion Business

Your resources remain, but you’ll replay the same content a lot. Even on entirely different routes, environments and characters reappear. In fact, as we idly tapped through a scenario for the dozenth time, our mind drifted to the branching course map from Out Run – regardless of which finish line you aim for, the route there unavoidably retreads old ground. Then we thought how we’d rather be playing Out Run. As a text adventure, there’s just not enough variety to make finding all those endings worth it. With so many games coming out on the Switch so quickly the challenge isn’t just to make a decent game, it’s also to be noteworthy in some way that makes it easy to notice. Even with the competition being tough at the very top there seems to be enough oomph in the Nindie space (at least for now) to propel games that are at least moderately good to some success. No doubt trying to get a piece of that Switch pie is Star Story: The Horizon Escape, an adventure game that offers an abundance of choices but that nonetheless struggles a bit to be interesting.In the game you’ll take on the role of a space explorer of sorts who ends up finding himself stranded on an alien planet, with relatively limited resources. Given this situation you’ll need to do what you can as you explore to try to put yourself into a better position.

EVERY STORY NEEDS AN ACTION SCENE

The attempt to make things interesting, and encourage replay, lies in the fact that in almost every situation there are often choices you can make. Do you play it aggressively? With some ingenuity? Do you try to charm your way through things? Maybe a little bit of each? There’s no clear roadmap to success so you’ll need to try to trust your instincts and see where those take you.As you accrue decisions in each column you’ll get opportunities for crafting gear that’s appropriate to the style you’ve chosen, whether geared towards weaponry, gadgets, or things like healing. You’ll discover blueprints through your travels as well, and you’ll need to put together a plan for what gear you’ll need to best suit your plans. Even if you try to be more pacifistic you’ll still get into combat, which is somewhat turn-based as your attacks and weapons will have cooldowns you’ll need to be aware of. Though it’s not terribly thrilling there are benefits to being mindful of your enemies’ weaknesses to try to work through them as efficiently as possible, hopefully conserving gear in more limited supply for when you may really need it. Overall, I wouldn’t say there’s anything terribly flawed about Star Story but at the same time, especially in light of the strength of the Switch lineup, it’s just not terribly notable. People searching for action won’t find it here, its role playing elements are pretty limited Fatal Frame Maiden of Black Water 

And the variety offered with your choices simply doesn’t carry enough consequence or interest to be compelling. There are worse offenses, certainly, than being a bit dull, but there’s just nothing here than stands out to generate any enthusiasm over. Star Story is a Turn-Based RPG with an emphasis on its interactive story, with the game playing out partly as a sort of “choose your own adventure”-style story and boasting 24 different endings based on your choices. The story here is a whimsical one about a roguish lout sent to a far planet on a research mission. The writing here is amusing, though not especially engaging, and the characters aren’t especially memorable, but they don’t grate on you either. The RPG half of the game is equally okay. There’s nothing here especially noteworthy, but nothing outright terrible, either. Sorry, just don’t have much to say about it. Visually, this game has a great, colorful art style, but the animation is lacking. I know, not exactly a deep dive into this game, but I honestly came out of Star Story: Horizon Escape with an overall “meh” feeling. It’s not bad, it’s not great, it’s just okay. And given how many great RPGs there are on the Switch, “okay” doesn’t really cut it. Things get off to a well-paced start, and the game quickly sets the stage for its largely text-based story.

THE STORY IS THE STAR

Star Story is eager to explain its various systems, but nothing is complicated enough to warrant extensive, tedious tutorials; thankfully the developers don’t make the mistake of providing them. The narrative is constantly moving forward, and there is no option to reverse course (barring the regular chance to teleport back to base for crafting).Decisions and other key activities are handled with simple mouse clicks, and the protagonist is always moving through the side-scrolling world, divided up into deserts, forests and mechanical fortresses. Most of the action is based on making sensible decisions in the situations the narrative presents or on having the right equipment for the right problem (many options are only available if you’ve brought along the correct gear).The other side of Star Story is the combat; this is a simple, turn-based experience that is once again fairly dependent on bringing the right weapons or equipment. Different types of damage are more effective against shields, armor or squishy flesh, and it’s important to manage resources appropriately so that the right weapons can be brought to bear in any given fight. I found the combat fairly tame, as long as weapons are all regularly charged, but it is satisfying to peel away the enemies’ defenses fight after fight. The aforementioned unlock system is tied to a kind of morality points system faintly reminiscent of the famous (or infamous) “paragon/renegade” system from Mass Effect. Fatal Twelve

Weapon improvements can be unlocked by making bold, aggressive decisions, health and support gear is accessed through helping others and being cooperative, whilst tech equipment is unlocked through seeking scientific solutions to problems. I found this system initially quite engaging, but over time it becomes easier to effectively farm these points and so shore up weak points. Nonetheless, it is an interesting and unusual system. The crafting side of Star Story is both a strength and a weakness. It’s always fun to be gathering materials and cobbling together new gear, but the game insists on transporting our hero back to base to do all of this, and in order to progress safely it becomes necessary to make this transit quite often. It would be less of an issue if this didn’t mean having to sit through two – admittedly very short – loading screens every time. I think the crafting side of Star Story would be better if integrated, as a menu, into the main adventure screen. The level of polish on Star Story is variable; the music is on point and tonally appropriate for the story, whilst the visuals are beautiful and vibrant. Where Star Story fails is in one of its most crucial aspects: the writing. As a largely text-based adventure, Star Story is unsurprisingly heavily reliant on its writing, and unfortunately there are many basic errors here, ranging from small punctuation or grammar issues to significantly garbled sentences in danger of losing their intended meaning.

The combat aspect certainly sets Star Story apart from most other games in this vein. Reminding me a lot of Galaxy of Pen and Paper, there’s a certain wink and a nod with each turn-based encounter that Van runs into. Each opponent (which often looks like a space shrimp) will present different approaches in how to deal with the hostilities. The most sure-fire way to die is to simply keep hitting it and hope things will work out for the best. Alright, that’s not exactly true: if you dump all your stats into strength, raging on things will often work out just fine. But to maintain a good amount of leftover HP and to make the battles go faster, you gotta carefully choose what items you want to use and in what order. Stun grenades, corrosion blasters, hack viruses and more will give you variety in how to approach the battle. In all cases, making sure you can hamstring your opponent (either by destroying their defense or stunning them and earning extra turns) is key to getting out mostly unscathed. Of course, the combat is a background note to the story itself. Star Story: The Horizon Escape is pretty damn engaging, but it feels like some of the game’s length is slightly manufactured. In fact, it becomes apparent the perceived “point and click” interface is little more than an atmospheric framing device that adds some valuable screen time to the environment.

Add-ons (DLC):Star Story: The Horizon Escape Switch NSP