Startide

My honest first impression of Startide: the concept has teeth. Nine mechs to pick from, each carrying different guns and close-combat weapons, customizable skill combos, a ship editor where you assemble your own fleet from salvaged parts, and an online ranked mode to test those builds against other players. On paper that sounds like a tight little arcade shooter worth a few evenings. The reality is duller. The core loop parks you in a top-down arena and has you circle large modular enemy ships, chipping away at outer weapon modules until only the core is exposed. Procedural generation means the enemy ships vary in theory, though in practice the variation rarely changes how you actually play. The deeper mechanical problem is that dismantling a ship's weapons makes every fight progressively easier as you go, not harder. You want escalation in an arcade shooter. Startide trends the opposite direction, and that drains the tension out of fights that should feel climactic. Players who have lived through bullet hell titles like Ikaruga or even older freeware shmups will recognize immediately that this pace is too slow and the feedback loop too flat. There is a story mode that tasks you with exploring five alien races, a supply-train interception variant that briefly breaks the monotony, and asteroid-field breather sections, but none of it rescues the game from feeling like a single boss encounter stretched out over multiple hours. Reviewing community reactions, the phrase that keeps surfacing is "boring shoot-em-up," which is a genuinely hard thing to achieve in this genre. The multiplayer side is local only, covering both co-op and PvP in split-screen. No online co-op. For a game that tags itself multiplayer and ships a ranked mode for custom ship builds, the lack of online co-op is a real miss. If you have a couch buddy willing to sit down with you, the two-player co-op adds a bit of life. Solo, the player counts on Steam tell the rest of the story: peak concurrent users hover around two at any given moment. That is not a community you can rely on for ranked queue fills. The ship editor and Workshop support are the strongest hooks here, and they are genuinely interesting ideas. Building your own vessel, tweaking its loadout, then throwing it into a ranked test against a friend's creation scratches a creative itch that the campaign does not. Whether that editor has enough depth to justify the time investment is a personal call, but it is the only part of Startide that feels alive. Controls have drawn criticism across platforms, and the PC version's age means you are not getting modern input refinement. Performance is stable, at least. If you are hunting for a shmup fix right now, there are sharper options at every price tier. Startide is the kind of game that might click for a very specific type of player: someone who wants a low-friction canvas for ship-building experimentation and does not mind thin combat surrounding it. Everyone else will likely tap out inside two hours.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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