If there ever existed a perfect example of a budget RPG, it would be Starbites. Elements of it aren’t terrible. The problem is it feels very basic and rudimentary. Even when it starts to get into something that feels unique, part of its design or gameplay keeps it from sticking the landing. Worse, Starbites performs so poorly on the Switch that actually sticking with it can feel like a challenge.
Bitter is a planet where people are born deep in debt, forced to survive on a barren world at the whims of loan sharks and getting by as best they can in Fennec’s city called, ironically, delight. Lukida managed to save up for a ticket off of the planet and is excited about escaping, sharing her joy with her friends Badger and Gwendoll. However, when heading out after telling them the good news, an abnormally large and dangerous robot wipes her and her motorbot (mecha unit) out. She wakes in Delight with even more debt and the ticket gone, and searching to discover what happened to it leads to a larger journey.
The story is… fine? It’s not really earth shattering. Lukida can be a compelling character sometimes, but there were moments when I felt like her allies could fall into certain tropes and stereotypes to fill roles in the party and story. My affection for them felt based more on their utility in combat than their story beats. Occasionally it’s funny. But the structure is such that I think it’s easy to see where the story is going and what’s coming.
The combat is also fairly typical turn-based fare. In battle, a timeline in the upper left shows when your allies and their motorbots will attack and opponents will strike. Lukida and her two allies in battle with her can attack, use a skill or item, or guard, with each character having a certain type of damage tied to them. Attacking an enemy once will show if they’re weak to it. A Driver’s High that increases the power of a character can be triggered if they deal and take enough damage to fill that gauge. Also, hitting weaknesses can cause additional allies who are set as a support for ones in combat to pop in for a single follow-up attack when you “break” that character. Standard fights are fine, though it can be a bit simplistic and wear on. Bosses can feel like real threats, but more due to how much damage they can take before dying. It’s all okay, but feels like systems we’ve seen before.
I think what bothers me most about Starbites is how bad it looks and runs on the Switch. Whether I played it docked or in handheld mode, the textures looked terrible. Robots’ metal bodies, building interiors, and planet exteriors looked low resolution and blurry no matter how I played it. Character models for NPCs looked bad. Major characters fared slightly better, but don’t expect to see any of the finer points of their characters represented on them when exploring areas. Considering about half the game we’re on a barren, boring, and even shockingly empty planet, the presentation makes it feel worse.
Starbites also just doesn’t work as well as you’d expect on the Switch too. I noticed the frame rate could drop when I’d be moving from one point to another on the world map or would suddenly stutter when using certain abilities in battles. I could forgive frame rate issues if it at least functioned aside from that, but it doesn’t! I held off on my review to see if an issue where the game would just crash when I’d move from one area of the map to another, specifically in the third and fourth acts, would be fixed. But I still saw it happen.
Maybe after a few patches Starbites will be passable, but I think this budget RPG isn’t ready for Switch owners right now. Its story and combat feel pretty basic and don’t reinvent the wheel. The fact that it looks so poor both docked and undocked, doesn’t run well, and straight up crashes out when moving between some areas means I’d recommend waiting for a demo or a sale on another platform rather than grabbing it for the Switch.
Starbites is available on the Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC. A Switch 2 version is in development, but doesn’t have a release date yet.