Legends of the Universe: StarCore Review

If you were alive and ‘web surfing’ in the late ‘90s and early 2000s you might have become a fan of web-comics, specifically in this case, sprite web comics. Usually a four+ panel comic, updated regularly, using the sprites of famous games to present a whole new story! The most famous of these was called ‘Bob and George’. Using sprites from Mega Man, spawning countless imitation Mega Man sprite comics and starting the craze of authors clumsily inserting themselves into their comics and having omnipotent powers. Bob and George finished in 2007 and the world moved on, except perhaps the creators of StarCore.

StarCore starts off with the very original premise of having you play as Trion, the leader of an Arkonian team. Sent take down the evil Draketh Empire that has a planet destroying weapon and saving the universe from tyranny. Yay! Unfortunately due to … circumstances, your weapons and abilities are stripped from you so you must explore the enemy's ship, take back your weapons and abilities and defeat the evil Empire!

The game is pretty basic, you explore places, if you can’t access an area it means you’ve missed a weapon/ability, so you find what you need, get passed the barrier till you find a new barrier, find the weapon/ability to get through that barrier, rinse and repeat. StarCore doesn’t change it up much, the backgrounds rarely change, there’s a lot of the same enemy types repeated and there’s never anything really difficult or challenging put in your way. If you can get through the first 30 minutes without dying you’ll be fine for the other hour or two it’ll take to complete. The main challenge is just knowing which is the right path to take to get the weapon/ability you’ll need.

The graphics themselves are nothing to write home about. Going for the nostalgic feel of using edited Mega Man sprites and animations it actually just comes across as lazy. The editing is pretty poor, especially seeing everyone and their grandma were experts at Mega Man sprite editing in the early 2000s you’d think they could come up with something better. Though the worst is the background. Just various grey walls, no real interesting environments to speak of, and in a game where the main premise is to explore, not having any real variation in your backgrounds is pretty criminal, though in this case I would say more lazy.

And that’s about it for Legends of the Universe: StarCore, search for weapons/abilities, get to the next area, defeat easily beaten bosses. Thankfully the game is pretty cheap so if you have some spare time and enjoy Metroid games and like the aesthetics of old style Mega Man games you’ll get some enjoyment out of it.