Game Reviews

Furious Stars

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iOS
| Furious Stars
Get
Furious Stars
|
iOS
| Furious Stars

For a game about giant star gods sailing down from the sky to wreak havoc on the humans they created, Furious Stars is a strangely flat experience.

It's a minimalist strategy game that gets bogged down in story and menus, holding your hand a little too tightly to begin with and then throwing you to the wolves when it thinks you've learned enough.

The end result is a game that never sparks into life. It's muddled and confused, and picking it up for a quick play is a surprisingly arduous task.

There are some neat strategic ideas here, but in the end waging war against a sentient sun turns out to be just as futile as you might expect.


The sun has got his hat on, he's coming out to slay

The game mashes up tower defence and RTS ideas to create a side-on 2D troop-'em-up that's all about marshalling your troops to protect a town from the titular angry celestial body.

First up you choose what type of town you want to defend. There's a desert setting, a forest setting, and a frozen setting to pick from.

Then you decide on the type of magic you want to wield, and you're dropped into the world to learn the basic controls.

You'll spend most of your time spawning and moving warriors. You can move the point where your fighters enter the town with some taps, and moving your units around involves drawing on the screen to select them.

The controls aren't exactly smooth, but most of the time Furious Stars is a pretty hands-off experience anyway. When things get chaotic it gets a little fiddly, but by then it's probably too late.


Naughty dragons, stay away from those towers

The action the game throws at you isn't really that interesting, and quite often you won't really know what's going on due to the slightly muddy, chuggy graphics.

Star gods spewing out disgruntled rabbits to slaughter townspeople should be a pretty funny thing to see, but you're too busy churning out units in a glum game of tap and overwhelm to notice.

There are some neat ideas in Furious Stars, but they're too few and far between, and while there is fun to be had here, there's not enough to really recommend picking the game up.

Furious Stars

A mish-mash of good ideas and poor execution, Furious Stars has its moments, but they're too few and far between
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.