Some of my readers may remember Last Galaxy Hero, a game that was given away back in January. It was a turret-based shooter, and was widely derided as having low-quality graphics, little variety, and a general lack of enjoyability.
Star Warrior took the same concept, and did it right.
For those not familiar with turret-based shooters, they are simply games in which the player stays in one position, mowing down slow-moving enemies with a powerful turret-based cannon. Though typically found as minigames within conventional FPSs and flight sims, a few are self-contained. Star Warrior is one of them.
Star Warrior ditches the conventional ground-based turret in favor of a floating spaceship, allowing free rotation in all three axes of space. Why it cannot actually move is a mystery, since it has the potential to be a great space-combat game in the vein of Elite, but it's still extremely fun. Enemy waves are well-timed, the difficulty is balanced, and the missions are short. I can't comment on the controls, since I used a touch-pad, but they seemed a bit floaty.
The graphics are perfect, looking like something on the PS2. The game ran flawlessly at maximum specifications on my computer, and the explosions, missile trails, glow effects, and general polish were spot-on, with sharp, well-defined textures. It's pretty realistic, and has no slowdown(unlike Hyperspace Invader, a 3D shoot-em-up that had massive frame-skipping at its lowest specifications).
Star Warrior exels with its sound, as well. While the techno music isn't to my taste, the sound effects are well-done and gave the game a great feel. It's physically impossible, but sound in space can always make a good game better.
The story, though, is pretty much non-existent. The publishing blurb literally says, "Defend the planet against the alien invasion in this 3D turret space shooter." Even Space Invaders had that story. Despite the fact that the story is a complete cliche, the game's actual style is wonderful, the planet itself looking like a cross between Coruscant and the Death Star(for those who haven't watched the Star Wars - could it be the source of the name? - movies, it looks like a regular planet with a giant glowing circle in the top hemisphere), and the enemy ships looking like something out of TRON(again, for those who haven't watched the 1982 computer-generated classic, they have glowing lines of colored light all over them). The red exhaust trails are also a welcome change from the usual orange and blue ones.
Oddly enough, this game really didn't set my expectations very high when I started it. Rather than having an actual installer, it simply came with a .RAR extractor. Adding to the homebrew feel were a 90s-looking configuration dialog that I had to go through before I could play the game(while it's nice to be able to choose the graphics settings before clogging a computer with detailed 3D models, the interface was quite dated), and a badly-scaled loading screen. Once through that, though, the game had incredible polish - I didn't even need Compatibility Mode to run it in Vista!
Overall, I give Star Warrior a score of 7.2 out of ten(eight for gameplay, nine for graphics, seven for sound, seven for theme, and seven for finish). Even though it has a few missed opportunities, there's no denying that it's a great game.