Game Review: Starlifter (Commodore 64, Mastertronic)

Starlifter was programmed by Steve Lee, who in the early days of Commodore 64 games, brought you the likes of Falcon Patrol and its sequel.  Although not obvious when reading the inlay, when loading the game up and seeing his name on the title screen, you would hope for something that would be good fun to play.  The plot of the game is simple too – effectively you need to destroy the space convoys of the evil Peradusians, by shooting enough of them to break their enemy lines and ensure that their escort fighters cannot do any further damage.

Lift Me to the Stars

The game has the Load’n’play loading game during load, and the title screen has the Starlifter logo (note the star between the words star and lifter) as well as a high score table, complete with name entry option if you get that far.  The instructions incidentally are incorrect as you will need a joystick in port one instead of port two.  Get that swapped correctly, and you are ready to play, and I guarantee you will lose your first life within seconds the first time around unless you know exactly what to look out for.  This is because often an enemy fighter bullet can fire straight at you and hit you without any chance to react, especially with some attack waves.  That is the first of several flaws that you will encounter with the game.

Convoy Carnage

The space convoys of the evil Peradusians are made up of large cargo ships and small escort fighters, which have a good range of firepower to fire at you.  The cargo ships themselves have several defences which you can hit, but also offer considerable firepower back at you as their defence.  Although not clear at first, you will need to land multiple hits on the waves of escort fighters, to clear each level.  This starts at sixteen hits on the first level (oddly numbered zero) and increases by four each level, meaning the eighth and final level (numbered seven) requires forty-four hits to complete.

My F1-11 Was Built to Shoot-em-Up

Although your ship can head over the surface of the cargo ships, much danger awaits as the fire from the targets on them is both multiple and often lethal.  They will also fire towards whichever direction you are heading too, and careful shooting is required to hit those targets.  They do at least then allow for more manoeuvrability around when you do, but often than not a stray bullet will hit you.  It does not help that the colour of the bullets for both you and the enemies are the same, so in the heat of battle and turning to face the other way, it is not always certain which bullet may be yours, so something to note.

Hit After Hit After Hit

Hitting the targets on the cargo ships also does not reduce the number of hits required to complete a level either – you can only reduce that count by shooting the fighters, so you need to be careful, line yourself up and hit the target.  Provided they do not fire quickly at you, often staying at the bottom of the screen proved to be the safest option and you could move left and right to then change direction and shoot.  That is also a bit of a gameplay flaw, in that you would expect to need to move around a lot more but staying down there can often get dull and repetitive, especially if no fighters venture that far down the screen.   If you do lose one of your three lives, the hit counter does not reset, so if you need two hits, it is still the case after losing a life, which does help.

Spawning Suffering

Far too often, when you lose a life, the moment you start again you are placed in the centre of the level around the cargo ships.  If a wave of fighters has one firing straight at you, often from close range, you will instantly die another death.  In fact, in one game this happened twice over with the last two lives, and bear in mind that you only have three.  This could have been tweaked to give you a couple of seconds of reaction time to move out of the way and therefore not suffer instant death and would have considerably helped the gameplay too.  As it stands, it is just poor design and not enough playtesting or have someone point that out.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics in Starlifter are nicely drawn, with the enemy cargo ships having good definition and colour, with your ship having nice animation especially as it turns direction.  The bullets would have been useful to distinguish by colour at least to help, and the explosions are a little weedy, but all looks the part for its time.  The sound effects are reasonable, but the only piece of music is the title tune which lasts around fifteen seconds before repeating and will have you reaching for the volume control due to its repetitive nature.

Final Thoughts

Starlifter does try to be a no-frills shoot-‘em-up, with the premise of having to hit multiple enemies on each level to reach a certain number to complete being a sensible method of progression.  Unfortunately, the playability here (or lack of) lets the game down.  The instant death with a bullet hitting you within half a second of starting feels very unfair, with no time to react, and even though the controls are responsive enough, tweaks to the gameplay with more testing would have made some recommended improvements.  The hit counter not resetting when losing a life does help a little, but by the time you have got to later levels and realise the safe tactics is to stay at the bottom of the screen and shoot as you go, it becomes also dull and repetitive.  Steve Lee coded much better games than this one, and I would recommend you seek them out instead.

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