Project Starship from eastasiasoft and Panda Indie Studio is a minimalist bullet-hell shoot ‘em up on PS4. Learn more in our Project Starship review!

 

Project Starship puts you in the shoes of Garret or Gwen, two pilots who are tasked with saving their world from an ancient evil. You will need to make good use of your hand-eye coordination to avoid the hundreds of bullets coming your way in this widescreen shoot ‘em up, as there’s not much room for error when playing in the highest difficulty setting. You will be taking on large (and giant) floating eyes, opposing spaceships, deadly lasers, rotating buzzsaws, gigantic skeletons, dragons,

 

You’ll move your starship with the left analog stick or the D-Pad, shooting at anything that moves by pressing the X, L1, or R1 buttons. You can slowdown time with the Circle, L2, or R2 buttons and use any item you have collected by pressing the Square button. Before starting your run, you can select between the two available characters – Garret and Gwen, as well as pick between the difficulty settings, with your options being Easy and Hard. Stay alive by dodging all bullets, pick up some power-ups to improve your firepower, and aim for getting a new high score for each run!

 

The game’s content is randomly generated, so every run that you do will have different enemies with different movement and attack patterns, as well as different bosses to battle. On top of this, there are weird things called Mad Events that will take you to a separate playing field in which you’ll have to survive a random situation. For example, and as to not spoil things too much, you can end up fighting against a gigantic menacing skeleton who, while standing on the screen’s background, sends dozens of equally gigantic skeleton hands flying towards you, in an effort to destroy you.

 

As for the trophies, this one has a Platinum trophy for you to unlock, and it’s just the one Platinum since this time around there’s no PlayStation Vita version for this particular release. As for what you need to do to get that Platinum trophy, the good news is that you’re looking at an hour at most to get all of the trophies since you’ll have to lose eight, sixteen and twenty-four shields – your lives – while playing, collect five, twenty-five, and fifty pickups, kill hundreds of enemies, and more.

 

Project Starship is a fun shoot ‘em up that is not going to appeal to everyone. It’s low-res and very colorful presentation is certainly not for everyone, and the difficulty, even when playing on Easy, might be too much for some. In the end, this is a serviceable budget shoot ‘em up, out right now on PlayStation 4 for only $4.99.

Disclaimer
This Project Starship review is based on a PlayStation 4 copy provided by eastasiasoft.