Star Serum Lacks Originality, Entertainment
Star Serum ($1.99) by keith curtis is a copycat of “Star Wars” in just about every conceivable way, even down to the font. However, it’s not limited to falling short in creativity. There are other issues as well.
You play as Captain Morven, a war hero who is the sole survivor of a battle against aliens. The story starts with a comic-like prologue as you wake in a hospital facility.
A nurse patches you up and helps to begin your training. From here, you’ll need to rebuild your warrior skills to retrieve the Star Serum to save your people.
My eyebrow raised the moment I saw the “laser sword” ignite in the main menu. It only got worse from there.
As if having a renamed lightsaber isn’t enough, your first training exercise is to practice with it. Against drones. Drones that look exactly like the ones used for lightsaber practice in the movies. You’ll need to destroy fifteen of them by blocking their blasts of energy and hacking them.
The gameplay was so stiff and lifeless that I couldn’t make it past six without becoming bored.
Next comes the spaceship training exercise, which consists of flying your ship through an asteroid field. I was just waiting for some mention of Han’s “Never tell me the odds” line, though thankfully that didn’t happen.
Tap left or right on the screen to maneuver your ship around the asteroids. However, even just being within proximity of an asteroid is enough to blow up your ship. Can’t say that I finished this one, either.
Surely the next training exercise would be a little more original? Nope. Apparently Captain Morven can use a “force” to move objects (not The Force, mind you, but not far off, either).
This “space opera” game is sophomoric at best. The interface isn’t consistent throughout the game, gameplay shifts from one genre to the other, and the overall story just feels like a fanfic of Star Wars.
The developer pricing the app at $1.99 shows how they are more concerned about making money than delivering a quality experience for the player.
