Starlite: Astronaut Rescue - Developed in Collaboration with NASA Reviews

My playthrough lasted exactly 19 minutes... As that's when I completed the darn game. Really. And I wasn't trying to play it fast. I think even kids who play this will finish in about 15 minutes. You're offered so much hand-holding in this game there's no sense of accomplishment. Boring.

A very short "point and click" game that seems to be the developers way of putting out a demo/teaser of their game before they release their bigger project out there. Its simple and has its flaws but personally I like the idea and could see myself trying out the future releases as this first one was quite relaxing and casual to playthrough. It only has one achievement and its for beating the game so nothing special you need to think about with this one. [b]Time to 100%:[/b] ~20 minutes

I played this several months ago, and it was okay. It seems like there should be alot more, but as a very simple space walking sim it was okay. I got it on sale for less than $2US and overpaid. I'd say at retail 3/10 but if it ever went into a bundle so it was less than 50c US then it might be worth the easy 100% achievement.

Starlite: Astronaut Rescue is a 2002 tech demo for... oh wait. Nevermind. It's a "mini-adventure", sporting "Unity Terrain Mars Environment and Shadows, Futuristic advanced rover setting, advanced biosuit space suits, professional voice acting, realistic physics, original story and dialogue; and advanced robotic navigation". Every single one of the aforementioned features are over-exaggerated. This [i]cough[/i] game [i]cough[/i] is what you'd expect from one of those 100 Games on 1 Disc compilations for Windows 95. It's truly awful, but luckily it lasts only 15 minutes. My single positive for this title is that I encountered zero bugs/issues with my short experience. But, bugs/glitches are directly proportional to content, and so this is expected. In your short experience you'll control a rover and a human character. The looking action is awful, and movement is just as bad thanks to really terrible mouse acceleration. It feels as if the player is on ice. This problem is disguised as 'realistic physics'. It's annoying, plain and simple. Jumping and staying in the air for 2 seconds longer, and walking with longer strides is realistic physics. Not releasing the W key and waiting 2 more seconds for your character to come to a halt. Eugh. The story is a generic rescue mission, which is outlined in the title of the game. Going along as usual, someone had an accident, you have to find them by completing abstract tasks and finally you're rewarded by landing back at square one. There are a grand total of [b]three[/b] 6th grade maths problems that need to be solved, a 30 seconds crafting bit (with a cluttered interface) and then a short driving and positioning part with a rover. Oh and someone said some words at one point. Avoid.

This program presents itself as a game, and to be honest, it fits the definition, but it's definately not something you'd expect to see on Steam. It isn't terrible per se, but it can do with a LOT of improvement. For starters, the player moves around like a steady-cam; Everything is smoothed out, from the movement over hills down to the motion of the mouse. It feels unnatural to the point it seems you're playing a drone of sorts. Then there is the geometery; Terrain smoothing has been around for about a decade now, and it could have been used to some extent and look better than it does right now. Even with graphics set to the max I can see the edges a mile away. It is sloppy and it shouldn't have to be that way. And this doesn't go for just the terrain. The objects, entities and vehicles themselves look bad because of this. It is impossible to make a curved geometery that works on all hardware, but there are shaders and filters and all sorts of tricks that are very effective on that front. Texture quality; Well, there is some, just not a whole lot. This is again one of those points that would have been acceptable a decade ago. With an option 'Beautiful' I expect to see high resolution textures. This would all be acceptable in a simulator, which I suppose this falls under, if the actual simulation demanded high detail or amount of calculations that would justify sacrificing graphical fidelity. And that is probably what upsets me the most; It looks and feels quickly assembled in a Unity editor with little to no attention to detail or features. It looks and feels like a demo, which, at the time I bought it (a few years ago) was a bit more expensive than the 5 bucks (if not less) that's advertised these days. It does a good job as an educational tool, however, for both children who want to be astronauts and game developers alike (the latter probably isn't a complement though). It has some nice lessons in frequencies and stuff, but that's about the only thing it has going for it. Wel...it has the NASA logo up front, and it pained me to see the Gates Foundation in there as well, especially since it has the tendancy to crash when ALT+TABbing, but that may just be me. All in all I cannot recommend this for what it is. I love the idea, but there is no game here. What little simulation it has is completely on rails and there is no way to mess up or discover something that deviates from the main story, which plot also escapes me... I hope some developers got a lot of experience out of this, and I'm not sure about it's current price, but if you see this for anything over 50 cents, just leave it be. One final sidenote, this is an alpha test for Starlite: Astronaut Academy, to be released in 2014. That was a year ago. It has been sold (and still is) as seperate full-release title (There is no Steam Early Access disclaimer on the store page). These 2 things don't bother me as much as the fact that over the years there have been no updates, improvements or anything that indicates this being a work in progress or part of a bigger project which is still in progress (although I'm pretty sure that one's dead as well).

The Linux port is a complete farce - mouselook has been bugged since launch, and when the devs made it sort of work (by having the user click and drag their view around the screen, of all things) it turned out to be impossible to use the crafting bench anyway, rendering the game uncompletable. For £2, it's usually hard to go wrong - but this game certainly provides a way to do so. Do not buy.

Very short, and it appears Project Whitecard is no longer active indeveloping any games at this time. This "game" is really a technology test, and should have never been sold. if they needed funding, they should have used Project Greenlight, and not sold game demos. This replaced my postitive review from Feb 2014 review back when it looked like Project Whitecard might atually extend this into a full game. Two years later, and nothing at all.... I was *supposed* to be part of their game testing team, and I'm yet to have any new released to test. Go figure. Just as well though, this company is dead to me now.

Did you ever dream of going into space.... becoming an Astronaut and being one of the first people to stop foot on mars? When you were younger did you put on a tin foil helmet, tie a sheet around your neck, and climb piles of dirty clothes pretending you were walking on Mars... If so you were probably super stoked for this game... I never did these things though ..... (shifting my eyes from side to side to hide the fact I'm not being honest)... I figured for less than a dollar I'd grab this game, try it out for the 20 or so minutes that people claimed I'd get from it, pat myself on the back for taking a trip to the red planet and feel joy. Unfortunately that didn't happen, this game glitches like crazy..... the first glitch was the work bench, it wouldn't let me combine the items.... After trying about 1000 different directions I decided to check on line to see what I was doing wrong.... I did nothing wrong the game just didn't want to register that I was crafting.... So I finally get past this glitch and nearly immediately afterward I'm hit with a puzzle.... awesome... I solved the puzzle using the calculator..... sigh... again the game glitches up. It's not the worst thing in the world, but gets kind of annoying that you need to continually restart from the beginning after every glitch.. I can't recommend this game at all, even for .89 cent. It's far too short and bug ridden to be worth a purchase at all. Save your money for something else. The only saving grace is the fact that buying the game will allow you to get it's 1 achievement fairly easily... Is that enough to purchase the game.... well ask yourself if the extention of your e-peen is worth whatever price the game is selling for... I don't personally think it is.

Woah, well, that was short! Looking over a few of the reviews, there's not a lot I can contribute to this. I was expecting something like TakeOnMars, but what this is, seems to be a short demonstrator for, a generic 'mission'-based physics/maths tutorial for kids, themed around planetary exploration. You're cast in the role of "The Commander" of a two-man crew (but the other dude vanishes halfway through), and have to rescue an astronaut who's crashed on the other side of the hill by figuring out how to get there using some trigonometry... Except Trig's probably a bit too tricky, so all the game has you do is a few divisions on a calculator, and the game pretends to do the trig for you... I can see where they were going with it, and I hope they can clean this up and add some more missions, but I have to say, I can't really recommend it to anyone: The play length is ~5 minutes, if that. All the assets are there: Models, texture maps, voices, a GUI, etc... But it's all rough and unfinished, and given where the pilot 'crashes', I felt I could probably just walk there, rather than go through all the rigmarole of triangulating positions. No, I can't, in my heart, recommend this to anyone, I'm sorry. If you want to play astronaut, play Space Engineers, or TakeOnMars. This looks like a late-90s attempt at a 3d demo / maths tutorial. If it was far more polished, and had a couple of missions, then perhaps I'd give it a thumbs-up, but nobody should really pay money for this, sorry :(

A 20-minute look into the bleak future of United States space exploration if we continue cutting NASA's budget and failing to educate our citizens in math and science compared to other countries. It's a little-known fact that, during the development of Starlite: Astronaut Rescue, highly intelligent individuals who once helped put man on the moon were forced to simulate having no scientific education. The result is a game with physics that are all wrong and only 20 minutes of plodding, unrealistic content—all they could manage to create under these conditions before giving up. A real eye-opener, and a future none of us want to live in.