If you pay attention to this hobby for long enough, you’ll spot trends – some might say stereotypes – in various countries’ video game development scenes. For example, I’ve played quite a few games with incredible art direction but underwhelming mechanics that turned out to be French, Russia turns out a lot of depressing quasi-realistic military shooters, and many South Korean games are horny to the point of distraction.
Playing Star Fire: Eternal Cycle clarified a thought that I first had when I reviewed Evotinction last year: Chinese indie games play like they think the player was on their design team. No tutorial, no codex, little if any exposition: you’re thrown directly into the deep end in every way that counts.
On the plus side, that means you’re up and playing Star Fire in the first minute. It doesn’t burn its first hour on an extended tutorial or establishing its setting. Start a new game and you can be punching alien bugs in the face within 45 seconds. There’s something to be said for immediacy.
Star Fire begins in 2149 A.D., 7 years after giant insects emerged from the surface of the moon and swarmed over Earth. You’re the only remaining defender of humanity: a redheaded woman armed with electric gauntlets and dressed in club gear, because why be the last person on Earth if you ain’t cute. I think her name is supposed to be Erica.
Your goal is to jump into one of the Core Hive Zones and explode hostile bugs until they manage to get you to stop. Once they do, you respawn at your home station with whatever currencies you were able to loot, and can spend them to have a better chance of success next time.
Broadly, Star Fire is a roguelike that plays a little like an arcade beat-’em-up. At the start of the game, you can pick one of 3 weapons that determines Erica’s basic attack pattern, Hades-style, then start a run into the Hive Zones. It ends either when you die or when you reach the last available Zone for your current difficulty.
Along the way, you can level up, collect equipment for passive bonuses, and equip Insectoid Cores that you’ve seized from the Hive. These come in a number of specific elemental varieties, and while they all give you random buffs, all of them start getting really degenerate once you equip two or more of the same type. For example, Shadow Cores let you summon invincible clones of yourself for backup, Ice Cores provide a high chance to stun on hit, and Thunder Cores trigger an electrical field for close-range AoE whenever you use your heavy attack.
In another game, these might come off as somewhat overpowered, but Star Fire really wants you to immediately go for the really broken shit. Even on Difficulty 1, every boss is a giant sack of health with at least 5 additional lifebars’ worth of armor. If you aren’t deliberately pursuing a degenerate strategy where every individual attack lands like a small nuclear device, you will not survive. It sort of reminds me of the Disgaea postgame.
As a result, Star Fire is one of those power-crazed experiences that’s only really fun if you get a perverse, nearly erotic thrill from watching your numbers go up. It describes itself on its Steam page as “a love letter to classic arcade side-scrollers,” but the real audience for Star Fire is people who love it when enemies explode into a cloud of death arithmetic. It’s got more in common with Dungeon Fighter Online and various mobile games like it than with old-school quarter-munchers.
Its lack of interest in explaining itself does mean it’s got a learning curve. The first few minutes of Star Fire is a deluge of random stats, skills, bonuses, and synergies, and it’s up to you to figure out what they all mean. Some have tooltips, others don’t, and still others have tooltips but they’re not where you’d think they’d be.
It’s nothing you can’t figure out eventually, especially if you’ve spent any time with other similar roguelikes. For example, Star Fire’s stacking elemental synergy system isn’t a million miles away from Inkbound’s. Even so, Star Fire seems to have been designed on the presumption that it will never have a new player. One of its loading screen tips even encourages you to look up third-party guides.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining. The big draw behind Star Fire is that it’s happy to let you be profoundly overpowered, but each new difficulty turns up the dials more than enough to keep you guessing. Even when I’d reached a point where I could vaporize incoming bugs without effort, the next boss always had something blatantly unfair waiting for me.
Star Fire: Eternal Cycle isn’t exactly what it says it is; it’s a roguelike that wants to pretend it’s an arcade brawler. Fortunately, it’s a decent roguelike, especially if you enjoy it when a game lets you deal millions of points of damage at once. You’ll want to give yourself some grace as you figure out its finer details, but Star Fire isn’t a bad way to spend about 40 minutes at a time.
[Star Fire: Eternal Cycle, developed by Ethereal Fish Studio and published by Indie Herb Games, is now available for PC via Steam for $16.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by an Indie Herb Games PR representative.]
