Review: Starlit Adventures

Starlit from Rockhead Studios is a free-to-play title on Xbox. Charmingly created around easy platformer puzzles that require wearing different suits. We got a few bad examples from mobile ports on Xbox but I got intrigued when I learned more and saw the 55k positive user reviews on the app store. Yes, it features microtransactions and yes I’m aware that’s a huge turn off for many gamers but you can play the game entirely without spending a dime. So be sure to simply try it out for yourself after reading my review, it’s completely free and I’m sure most of you will like it a lot,

What we liked!

• Simple but fun co-op play and leaderboards: What a lovely game to play casually with friends! Easy enough for non-gamers but with enough depth and fun for hardcore gamers. It is a perfect mix between puzzle solving, platforming and plain old fun. Another GREAT feature is that every level has leaderboards, after you finish a level you will immediately see if you did better than friends. And let’s be real, who doesn’t want to beat friends, right?
• Content: Let’s get the boring stats out of the way: 144 challenges, more than 200 story-levels in 8 different themed worlds, an endless mode called Infinite Tower and a daily run. Starlit gives and keeps giving for a long time and that for surprising price tag of €0. Along the way you unlock suits with special abilities, stickers for your sticker album and coins, lots and lots of coins. Overall you’ll have enough to do’s to play well over 10 hours, thanks to changing gameplay mechanics with the 12 different suits it continues to remain fresh and exciting too.
• Visual style: Screenshots don’t really benefit Starlit as the massively cute characters and crystal crisp graphics come to fruition while seeing it in action. Might be a little weird for some to have the sidebars but it comes with some useful information. People who played Rare Replay might know this reduced screen mechanic. I guess it’s easier this way to bring it from mobile to consoles, I honestly didn’t mind as I have a fairly large TV anyway.

Somewhere between

• Floaty controls: Platformers and controls, can there be anything more important? It does take some time to get used to the rather unresponsive controls but for some weird reason the game simply works with this handicap. The game doesn’t really feature difficult moments so I guess that’s why I didn’t really get frustrated.
• Sticker Album: A great reason for replay value but it comes with some questionable stuff, here you start to really notice the nature of microtransactions. While completing this sticker album only rewards you with a 100 Gamerscore Achievement it might be annoying for some completionists to find all stickers. They are randomly rewarded and you’ll get a lot of stickers multiple times, meaning you might be spending hours and hours to finally get that last sticker.

What we disliked

• Infinite Tower bugs that force a restart: One major complaint with the Infinite Tower is a forced ending because the game bugs out. On separate playthroughs I got stuck because my path was blocked by lava (that couldn’t be removed) or because a rock was blocking my way that required the bomb class. I don’t know if this is intentional but I found it extremely annoying to stop my progress because I didn’t have any solution available.