Starfighter Renegade Reviews

It looks like it could be a fun retro shooter, but I am going to refund it for two reasons: 1. The cockpit view implementation is strange, it changes heading but not pitch. 2. Most importantly, it does not support flight stick (HOTAS) controls. On the plus side, it does run in Windows 7 64-bit. Colliding with the terrain is not hazardous, which is a bummer. It does support Mouse control, and with XPadder I can get it to kind of sort of work with my flight stick, but it's very klunky and hardly a fun play experience. I think XPadder would work better with this game if there was an option to let the mouse work like a joystick, if I keep the mouse position on the right side of the screen, the ship keeps turning right, if I move the mouse to the center of the screen, it stops turning. If I keep the mouse pointer halfway between the right and center, it will continue to steer at half speed. As it is right now, the steering auto-centers so you have to constantly fight it. If the controls could be improved, I will repurchase it. For now, I will refund it.

Each level has 8 tiny and semi-transparent (unless you're mildly far away, then the LOD makes them completely invisible) hidden orbs to collect, which already isn't a great idea, and the counter indicating how many you've found in the current level stops working randomly. After each level there's a simple "bonus stage" with one out of a few minigames, all boring, all unskippable, all with terrible controls you can't change and excessive cursor sensitivity you can't change either. Crashing into the terrain means you bounce off harmlessly 90% of the time and instantly die the remaining 10%: by the way, you have limited lives, and I haven't encountered a way to replenish them. The game claims to have full controller support, which means the left stick moves around the cursor you'd normally control with your mouse: technically it's supported, in practice it's utterly unplayable. The flying around and shooting enemy spaceships is passable on mouse+keyboard, worse than what browser games did 15 years ago but at least somewhat enjoyable, unfortunately it offers very little in terms of variety and challenge so it grows old rather quickly. Overall, not worth your time even if it was free.

I enjoyed the simple flying more than I thought I would. You'll know rather quickly if this game is for you.

Just as it looks, this is a love letter to an older generation of shooters, it plays really well with mouse and keyboard. 50 very replayable levels, looks great if you like the retro aesthetic. Easy recommend