Game: StarScraper
Genre: Indie, Simulation, Strategy
System: Steam
Developers | Publishers: Mitchell Garrett, Jonathan K-Q, Rosae Ex Ludis
Price: US $19.99 | UK £15.49 | EU € 16,79
Controller Support: None
Release Date: June 10th, 2021
Review code used, with many thanks to Rosae Ex Ludis
You’re the new boss of a skyscraper building in this simulation, strategy game from developers Rosae Ex Ludis indie game development studio.
Build a Skyscraper
Your task in StarScraper is to build and manage a Skyscraper. The game is similar to previous tower building games we have seen such as Project Highrise: Architect Edition on the Nintendo Switch or even Fallout Shelter in a way.
Unfortunately for StarScraper both of those game I’ve mentioned are far better and play as they should, unlike StarScraper. You see, every time I played StarScraper which incidentally opens like a browser game, the first and only thing I ever saw was a full screen of clouds.
The game is fully controlled by the mouse and the camera of the game is oversensitive to the movement of the mouse. So I had to go looking through the clouds towards the ground to find the building I was meant to be managing. Not a very enticing start to the game.
No Tutorial
The second off-putting thing about StarScraper: once you actually find the building there isn’t a tutorial. Nope, none. I’m an old hand at gaming and I figured out what to do pretty sharpish. However, if you are a newcomer to this genre of game you will be left floundering in lots of menus to click on and without much help.
There is a tiny book on the left of the screen and it does give you very limited help and a few instructions, but not enough to tell you the ins and out of the game’s menus and how to play the game to its fullest. I’m not asking for hand-holding help the whole way through the game but some help is much needed.
Click, click
The core of the game is of course building management. it has all the usual sort of building units you would find in this type of game. You can build apartments, a Doctors office, a medical centre and food units and more. Keeping an eye on your budget is important as you don’t want to run out of cash. You can even trade your own corporate stock to get quick cash and increase your net worth. The gameplay is interesting but I have to say there isn’t anything we haven’t seen before in games of this genre.
Building new rooms in your skyscraper is just an exercise in clicking and placing the building units into the tower. Unfortunately, that gets repetitive very quickly. During the whole game, I mainly felt like I was copying and pasting images of rooms and watching figures dander into them and out again. The UI in the game is fiddly and slow to use and doesn’t feel intuitive.
There is Potential
StarScraper has the potential to be a decent game but not at the moment. The game felt more like a beta build of StarScraper than a fully finished game while I was playing it. The buildings and rooms that you do build look flat, and finding your building at first is already a challenge with the wonky camera controls. The little people that populate your skyscraper just walkabout, there is very little animation in them. It is all flat and kinda dull and uninviting in a way.
There isn’t any scenarios or a campaign mode, it is just you and your building expertise. I think a few scenarios would be an interesting addition to the game as some players do like a set goal or challenge to work towards.
Conclusion
StarScraper in my opinion needs more work before it is worthy of the $19.99 price tag it has. I do think that some more development of the game will improve it and maybe added some scenarios would help too. The game currently feels unfinished and the camera likes to float off into the clouds. At it is now I can’t recommend StarScraper, and the price tag just isn’t justified.
Final Verdict: I Don’t Like It 