StarForge Review: Crowdfunding Nightmare - YouTube

Before there was "No Man's Sky", there was "StarForge".

You might not recognize it by the title alone, but the gameplay reveal of it got around.

The game "Minecraft" was in a popularity golden age, so, naturally, other developers wanted to get in on this.

But "StarForge" was selling itself as being much more than a "Minecraft" clone.

For starters, they were aiming to have more realistic visuals.

That's a pretty immediate difference.

On top of this, they sold it as more than just another building game.

There were gonna be RPG mechanics, there were gonna be team battles and PVP modes.

Environments would feel alive, you'd have custom weapons and could fly into space...

Wait... What?

"StarForge" used to hold the title of the fourth lowest rated game on Steam.

At least, until was taken off the website.

It seemed like they wanted it buried and forgotten, but I didn't forget.

Neither did the people who really got burned by it.

So, if you're not familiar with the game, you're probably wondering why it's so hated and how it ended up this way.

Well, this IS a review first and foremost, so let's take a look at the game.

The menu actually features the best part of the game, which is the soundtrack.

I've had it playing the whole time.

It reminds me of the "Terminator" theme crossed with "Starship Troopers".

This music has some soul, so good job, Kevin.

Generating a map for the game is simple, but the water height setting is a little vague.

Are there going to be no water bodies in the game without this?

I guess I'll know soon enough.

Uhh...

Well, so far it's like if Sean Murray was the lead developer for "Subnautica".

The game seems like it doesn't have a whole lot to process right now.

So I'm literally in a Land O'Lakes, but my frame rate isn't buttery smooth.

In fact, I'd say it's a bit more than marginally shit.

So what's happening here?

"StarForge" was built in the Unity engine, which has gotten a bad reputation for the wrong reasons.

This game here is called "The Forest".

It's also a Unity game that, at the time of this video, was still in Early Access.

It's a pretty game that's running without a problem, and I recorded this right after playing a session of "StarForge".

This might be one of the worst-performing games I've ever played.

So how come this Unity game runs and looks like this, and "StarForge" is... how it is?

The problem is not with Unity. It's with the developers.

There are plenty of popular, or at least well-performing games on Unity.

But now it's fallen prey to a curse.

You might know it.

"Crafting."

"Survival."

"Open World."

"Early Access."

These have all the letters you need to spell out "CURSE".

These are "CURSED RUNES".

It seems the more of those boxes you tick off, the more likely the game will be bad.

And yeah, I know there's some exceptions to this, but that's how a curse works.

It could be nothing and you'll feel silly for thinking about it,

or you get the equivalent of Imhotep sucking $20 out of your wallet.

Anyways, the reason things are this way is because Unity is a good engine for non-programmers.

It has a web store, where you can buy assets and essentially stitch together a video game out of them.

So most development teams with programming "know-how" will make their own engine or use something like Unreal.

But if they do use Unity, they know how to optimize assets and make it all run together.

There's a few things that give me the idea that "StarForge" lacked in this.

So, while on a technical level it's a nightmare, let's talk about the art style.

Colors in the game are very muted. There's just this general ugliness to everything.

I'm not sure if your hands are supposed to look like clay.

In fact, I'm not sure what a lot of things are supposed to be.

When I first started out, I had no idea what I was holding half the time.

That's really not a good way to start off.

A few of the biomes in the game are actually pretty neat.

Some of the strange plants and alien life kind of reminded me of the book "Expedition".

[Angry alien monster noises] But then you would have, like, these weird, armless Hydralisk worms that would attack you,

and any hope you have of getting kind of into the game is gone.

The enemies in the game get stuck on everything.

Their quality is also taken down by the poor, to sometimes broken animations they use.

This is on top of them looking technically low quality for a 2014 game.

Look at this for example.

This is a DEAD enemy.

Yeah, dancing around is the arachnids' "I'm dead" animation.

And this problem definitely isn't unique to be arachnid.

♥ Goodby-ye. ♥

♥ I love you~ ♥

One of the few things in "StarForge" that gave me genuine joy was watching animals fall down the mountain.

[screaming] One of the few things in StarForge that gave me genuine joy was watching animals fall down the mountain.

[screaming] I don't know why they didn't program their AI to handle slopes.

I mean, they did go through the trouble to animate and model these unique alien creatures, so...

Wait a minute.

What's this?

(reading): "Alien bug model 302, includes animation rig..."

Oh!

Oh, they didn't make these!

[shooting bugs]

[more shooting]

[angry alien worm noises and shooting sounds]

[Angry alien monster noises]

[Angry alien monster noises] DAVE: "He's eating me!"

[Angry alien monster noises]

[Angry alien monster noises] DAVE: "What the f-!"

[Angry alien monster noises]

There's no real way to tell how many this game's assets are really original.

The people they bought the alien assets from aren't listed in the credits,

so who knows what models they made compared to buying them off Unity.

But here's something that bothers me.

This is the original worm asset.

The guy who made it found out it was in the game when he saw the trailer.

He seemed pretty happy that his work was getting around.

The animations in his demo are very smooth and precise.

But what about when it's thrown into the physics of "StarForge"?

It seems kind of clear that it wasn't polished for this game.

Learning this explain so much about why the enemies acted bizarrely different.

I mean yeah, they were running on a budget, but we'll come back to that later.

So the art style is all over the place, clearly unfinished, and the game runs like garbage.

Not a great first impression.

I turned graphics down to the minimum at some point and it didn't look too different, and ran the same.

The visuals give an immediate impression that this game is broken.

Let me show you HOW broken.

Here's what happened when I dared to turn the in-game music down.

If a song falls in the woods does it... kill a tree?

Well, in "StarForge" it does.

They sold this for $30-

What about gameplay?

I mean, what's the whole point to playing "StarForge"?

If you've played any survival game, it's not a whole lot different,

but in this game you start scratching your head really early.

Like, why do I have to grab the space corn in one specific spot?

And three stalks only give me one fiber?

You kill a weird space pig to get meat, but it doesn't have any meat - it has a blueprint for cement stairs.

WHY?

Why does the drill make grass evaporate into nothingness, and why just doing that break the sound?

[Bizarre audio glitch]

How come I can't look at items in my bar to see what I'm holding, but I could look through at my inventory?

WHY?

The tutorial wasn't helpful.

I also couldn't change any of my keybinds, because I couldn't find any keybinds.

I had to look in the "StarForge" wiki, and even then, most of them are out of date.

I had to use a wiki to even find controls and even then they didn't work!

So, I figured I should consult the wise master.

I assumed he was like Sisyphus and only playing because it was a divine punishment.

But he logged out when he saw me connecting, so I guess I'll never know the answers.

BY THE WAY,

connecting has its own little quirks.

If you click "Connect", you're stuck forever.

You have to double-click the server name and then "Join" and you're good to go.

It's all so strange...

So, to make the game tolerable enough to actually play it, I brought in a team.

This could have been the largest influx of players the game has had all year.

DAVE: "Do you know what- Do you know what this makes me feel like?"

MANDALORE: "What?"

DAVE: "Remember that movie "Atlantis"?"

MANDALORE: "Yeah?"

DAVE: "There's that little, like, mole guy..."

MANDALORE: "Is that supposed to be you, Dave?!"

[Laughs]

MANDALORE BUDDY: "What the fuck?!"

Since the game had voxel terrain, we thought it'd be a good idea to dig.

Digging is one of the few things in the game that seems to work the way it's supposed to.

It's simple and kind of fun at first.

DAVE: "How'd you go so quick?"

MANDY BUDDY: "I just... held out the mouse button down."

DAVE: "That's what I did!"

DAVE: "And now I, like, I can see through the ground and see space..."

But if you dig too deep, then things can break.

And this doesn't matter too much, because you learn that digging is pointless.

"Minecraft" and games like it usually have resources under the ground.

"StarForge" has... piles.

The piles are massive and they only hold one resource.

So, instead of digging or using sensors or anything like that, you just sort of run around the surface looking for these piles.

Neither of these options are the good one. Just varying shades of bad.

This is mainly due to the physics.

"StarForge" uses a physics-based movement system.

Words really... fail to describe the system.

I'd compare it to selling an industrial furnace as a fast acting heater.

Yeah, it does do what it's supposed to, but is it really worth it?

I was only trying to walk down the hill here. I wasn't jumping or doing anything crazy.

(whispering) God, look at that frame rate...

Look at this!

DAVE: "Where are- Why are you- What the fuck..."

DAVE: "Why are you- What?"

This is the worst movement I've ever played in a 3D game. Like, hands down.

If you walk over a pebble that's too big, you'll go flying like Jet Li.

This system makes the game nearly impossible to play normally.

I think, it was designed for two things:

throwing yourself into these...

...and this.

It doesn't even let you fly all the way up.

That would... That would be a good selling point.

If the movement wasn't bad enough, the damage states are also very vague.

I think, they were going for a "Deus Ex'" limb-based damage system that they just never finished.

Frankly, I have no idea how it works.

But if we look past all of that, it is a game about collecting resources and surviving.

Naturally, crafting is a pain.

Some materials can be refined in structures, but a lot of them you need to do yourself.

One building block can take a few seconds to make. You can't queue up orders either.

So just building a really simple, like, 5x3 wall, might take you anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes.

This is counting the time you need to put the block where you actually want it to go.

As it turns out, physics-based movement is kind of bad for getting up on a precise angle.

So I can't really recommend building anything either.

The end game content appears to be this crashed Star Destroyer.

The challenge comes from it being swarmed by about 10 million worms, and it also gives off radiation.

It is a convenient four minute walk from the starting spawn though.

The radiation might also be melting my '1060.

At least, Tim is murdering the sleeping playerbase.

TIM: "I broke into his house!"

The ship is pretty small, is filled with annoying exploding enemies and you get stuck in everything.

At this point, this is all to be expected.

There's also mountain caverns with some enemies, but there's really no resources in here.

Like I said before, the blueprints come from killing the bugs, so you can do that anywhere.

I mean, what else is there to say? It's all broken!

The planet in "StarForge" is an unending nightmare, from which I cannot wake, so let's try going to space.

We'll take the helicopter.

Well...

"Elite Dangerous" and "Star Citizen" are finished.

Did they mirror the texture on the back?

Ugh, who cares...

♪ Highway to the danger zone! ♪

♪ Ride into the- ♪

Alright.

There's nothing new here. I screwed up.

♪ -danger zone! ♪

Going to space was a waste of time.

This game was a waste of time.

So, the big question is: why did it end up this way?

When you look at the Indiegogo numbers, you can see they raised nearly twice their budget.

The cash would be used to keep three devs running full time.

Along with buying assets from artists they had lined up. And also polish.

Really?

Events after the campaign get hard to follow.

The Indiegogo page has a year and a half long gap between content updates.

The team at Code Hatch was very quiet about progress.

The only media still on their YouTube channel is the release trailer.

So what's there to go on?

One view of the timeline was shown by an ex-community manager who made a long post on Reddit about it.

"StarForge: Developer Misconduct, a look back from the inside"

It details how the team would remain silent for months at a time about the project.

When it became one of the first games to debut on Steam's Early Access, everyone was surprised by it.

The manager talked to the team only about once a month and only through Skype.

At the end of 2013, they cut her from the team discreetly.

Throughout 2014 the game was making rapid progress.

Well, the version numbers were.

The game would jump from version 5.5 to 7.5 and so on.

These updates were adding very little to the game.

So when the new community manager was getting quiet in around July 2014, one forum user went digging.

Over the years, the team at Code Hatch had grown from the few members they had to around 17.

Using public information like "LinkedIns", the forum user found that most of the team was being sacked.

Out of the people they fired, two of them were the ex-developers at Bioware that they had bragged about.

Others with experiences in different fields were also fired.

Evidence pointed to the company being in massive financial trouble.

Anyone who spread this information on the forums or on Steam were banned.

According to Juno, 20,000 posts in total were removed.

This included information about development, promised features and more.

Down the memory hole it goes.

Version 1.0 was rushed out and it definitely wasn't finished.

The tragedy of "StarForge" has been buried, and this year it was taken off Steam and offered for free.

But why would they do that?

Well, they ARE selling a game called "Reign of Kings" on Steam.

Something about the UI looks strangely familiar.

A lot of the reviews I've read mentioned it being abandoned by developers and something bad happening...

Wait, is this happening again?

I guess the "memory hole" thing worked, because when I was reading reviews of "Reign of Kings" at the time, a lot of them didn't really mention "StarForge".

It seems, a lot of news outlets didn't even know.

So now when I see the Code Hatch logo, I can only imagine a guillotine in there.

The game is bad. In fact, it's atrocious.

But it's a game that I think more people should know about and what happened.

The next time you see a game with CURSED RUNES, just think about "StarForge".

And remember – Unity isn't the problem. Incompetence is.

Even in its pathetic state, I can still see that there's a good game buried in here somewhere.

If it was managed better and people were held more accountable, it might not have ended up this way.

For now, it's just a crumpled monument for Early Access abuse.

I'm still taking requests for all the games you want to see next.

I appreciate all the recommendations, codes and even artwork you guys have been sending me.

So thanks for watching!

Don't play "StarForge".

DAVE: "Dude, it looks like... "Prometheus", and, like:"

DAVE: "GO, my puppy!"

MANDALORE BUDDY #1: "Where are you- Where are you guys now?"

MANDALORE BUDDY #2: "What are you saying?!"

MANDALORE BUDDY #2: "OH! Oh!"

[laughing] MANDALORE BUDDY #2: "You're digging straight down to me, and you shouldn't do that!"

DAVE: "I'm digging to Hell!"