STARBITES Review (Switch)

Take a glance at the Switch’s selection of mech titles, from Daemon X Machina to Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, and you’re likely to notice a pattern. Aside from the occasional outlier like the tactical Front Mission remakes, action-based gameplay is almost always at the forefront when mechs are involved.

It’s easy to see why — those ever-alluring visuals of awesome-looking robots flying around and duking it out serve as the perfect foundation to craft weighty, tactile, and high-octane combat systems. Despite this precedent, developer IKINAGAMES has opted to break from the pack and try translating the fun of the mech genre into a slower-paced, classically-styled experience. 'Try' being the operative word here.

STARBITES is Ikina's take on the mech genre, given life in the form of an old-school, turn-based RPG. Set in a distant future where humanity has successfully colonised the star system, you play as Lukida, a scavenger on the wartorn desert planet Bitter who owes an eye-popping amount of debt to the leader of her city. Aided by her friends and equipped with their trusty mechs (known as Motorbots), Lukida sets out to find a way to escape her debt and leave Bitter behind.

It’s a promising concept at first glance, but Starbites features far too many pain points — from technical deficiencies to uninspiring gameplay concepts and a messy narrative — to ultimately take flight.

There’s an ugly elephant in the room that needs addressing right off the bat: Starbites looks extremely rough on Switch. Resolution in handheld mode is fuzzy, down to in-game text bubbles and loading screens. The game’s docked mode profile fares better, but both modes suffer from some downright abysmal texture work. Surfaces of everything from background assets to parts of character models look like blurry smudges, severely hampering the game’s colourful and cartoonish art style.

It would be easier to forgive Starbites’ visual shortcomings if performance was solid, but it suffers from its fair share of frame drops, lag spikes, and stutters. The original Switch may be long in the tooth, but it’s a proven fact that it’s capable of running far more visually-intensive titles than this with more consistent performance.

Once you move past Starbites’ poor technical first impression, you can get to grips with its central gameplay loop. As Lukida, you traverse the barren plains of Bitter and its various locales, piloting your Motorbot through labyrinthine areas filled with enemies, loot, and light puzzles. Between excursions, you can enter a number of POIs on foot, inside which you can talk with residents, take on side quests, upgrade your Motorbot, purchase items, and more.

The exploration component of gameplay isn’t wholly unenjoyable, but it’s simplistic to a fault. In practice, field traversal amounts to running into foes to activate battles, hitting ‘A’ to pick up sparkling items and open chests, and activating terminals with key items to progress forward.

Once it becomes clear that the game doesn’t iterate on this loop in any meaningful way across its entire runtime, the fun factor dulls pretty quickly. Areas are also visually bereft and same-y, even deep in the game’s later hours, which ostensibly feature more varied environments. To top it off, mech controls are sluggish and unresponsive, making it easy to overshoot your target.

The game’s turn-based combat system is also decidedly simple, though to more favourable results. In battle, you control a team of three party members and their Motorbots. On their turn, each character can perform basic actions like attacking or guarding, or consume TP to unleash a host of flashy special moves with elemental affinities. Hitting an opponent’s elemental weaknesses repeatedly will reduce their Break gauge to zero, temporarily incapacitating them and increasing damage received. Meanwhile, using certain attacks or taking damage will fill your characters’ Driver’s High gauge, allowing you to skip the turn order and unleash an extra-powerful version of one of your moves.

Game-specific jargon aside, these combat features will prove plenty familiar to veteran RPG fans. But what the game’s battle systems lack in innovation, they make up for by being refreshingly accessible and easy to learn. It also features robust skill trees for each character, encouraging you to power up existing moves and abilities rather than just tossing them away in favour of shiny, new ones. Forming a strategy that capitalises on the unique strengths of each party member and their ever-expanding arsenal of tricks is solid fun.

My only major complaint regarding Starbites’ combat is that it doesn't capitalise on its mech-themed flavouring in any substantial way. You equip each character’s Motorbot with standard RPG-style armour, as well as engines and cores that offer unique combat bonuses, but that’s about it. If you were to theoretically remove the Motorbots and change it so that each character used all of their abilities through magic, not much would functionally change. It feels like a missed opportunity not to incorporate more mech-specific systems into battles, seeing as they’re such a core focus of the title’s setting and narrative.

Speaking of narrative, Starbites’ is a mixed bag. Lukida’s quest to escape Bitter quickly spirals into something much grander, as she uncovers long-held secrets regarding both the planet’s past and her own. There’s an impressive amount of worldbuilding at play, with different events, characters, and locations connecting to one another in interesting ways.

Unfortunately, the game does a shoddy job of explaining all this lore, making the context that drives the plot forward unnecessarily convoluted. The story touches on a number of ethical themes, including artificial intelligence, cybernetic alterations to the human body, and digital consciousness, but it ultimately doesn’t do a ton with them. The game also relies on tired, textbook twists that you can see coming from a mile away, making the narrative feel toothless at times.

Most frustratingly, characters and plot points that feel like they’re going to be important often get brushed to the side, only to perfunctorily reemerge as the game reaches its conclusion, if they return at all. Several of your party members only get their backstory explained in the final one or two hours, as though the developers suddenly remembered they needed to explain why these characters are relevant at all. Even then, there are a ton of missing details and context that just gets completely glossed over.

On the other side of the coin, the characters themselves are generally likeable. Most of the main cast fall into traditional tropes and archetypes: Lukida as the scrappy leader with a heart of gold, Badger as the grizzled veteran with a rough past, Makobo as the nerdy girl with a passion for hacking, and so on.

That said, the dialogue script is nice and sharp, and characterisation is further bolstered by strong vocal performances across the game’s English dub option. The game strikes a cheery, adventurous tone for most of its runtime, which is a solid change of pace from the grittiness that often pervades cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic tales.

The game’s supporting cast, from a swindling bartender thief to a shopkeeper (who is definitely not an alternate-universe version of Doctor Eggman), is arguably even more entertaining than the main cast. Several of the cyborgs and robots are, perhaps intentionally, the liveliest characters you meet — and a few in particular are downright hilarious. Ultimately, the game had me wishing some of these side characters were the ones who joined my party rather than the teammates I ended up with.

If that was all there was to Starbites, I’d be content in chalking it up as an unambitious, visually lacklustre RPG with some bright spots in combat and character writing. Unfortunately, there’s one last woe that pushes things over the edge: the Switch version of the game is an unabashed technical mess.

Over the course of my playthrough, I ran into a borderline comical laundry list of bugs, glitches, and errors: game crashes, textures bugging out, missing combat effects with visual artifacts, the camera breaking and not following me, missing vocals during cutscenes, dialogue lines attributed the wrong character, character vocals not matching up with the in-game script, vocals where actors flubbed their lines, character models snapping into default positions during cutscenes — the list goes on and on. When I reached the final boss, it was completely missing all of its sound effects. So much for an epic conclusion.

Starbites isn’t just unpolished on Switch. It’s unfinished.