Where do you go after making Dorfromantik, the 14th best puzzle game on PC? Unto infinity, chick. Unto infinity, and all the uranium-packed celestial masses it contains. Berlin-based Toukana Interactive are back with Star Birds – another “soft strategy” sim and laidback resource management game, in which you take charge of an avian asteroid-mining operation.
The just-released early access build endeared itself to me instantly by having my bird captain quack like an Apple Macintosh, then sealed the deal with a procession of delightfully rotatable space boulders, some of which look like spangly Easter eggs and some of which look like handfuls of Emmental. Don’t call this a review, mind – I’ve barely played an hour, and the game won’t leave early access until at least this time next year – but I get the feeling Toukana are onto a good thing here. Another nice flourish: optional supply quests are presented as little dovecot windows from which a feathery Wesley Crusher peeks forth, waiting for you to accept their errand.
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An overview: Star Birds is broken into missions narrated by a cast of wisecracking astral warblers. The abundance of text dialogue is slightly stifling, for a puzzle game, but I suspect it’ll taper off beyond the initial tutorial sections. Each mission sees you parking your mothership next to a new asteroid field, and zooming on individual asteroids to build things and set up a production network. It starts with you socketing a launchpad into a crater, placing excavators on resource fields, and linking them to your launchpad with pipes to shuttle resources back to the mothership.
As the levels and story progress, you unlock and research new facilities, including chem labs that combine two kinds of resource into one. You’ll rarely find every resource you need for the quest at hand on any one asteroid. So you must build landing sites for rockets, and start moving resources between asteroids. All of this proceeds at a leisurely pace: no hazards, no mission timer.
The UI consists of phat, pastel, pressable buttons that are begging for a touchscreen port. Pretty much every action is performed with the mouse. It feels like they’re treading a delicate line between efficiency and whimsy in terms of the controls, I must admit. I can imagine being annoyed by the act of dragging out snarls of pipework between structures, in a game with more threat or urgency, particularly because pipes can’t overlap. You’ll probably have to go back and unravel them, whenever you need to alter the layout of your roids.
In the context, though, I find the slight tangliness attractive. This is a factory sim that also wants to be a toy, and has so far stuck the landing. If you’re short of credits for construction, you can also pop down a buggy and drag out a path for it between piecemeal gold outcrops.
I suspect Dorfromantik players might find Star Birds too fussy, next to the bucolic immediacy of popping down six-sided tiles, but people who loved Slipways and have at least a tolerance for ornithology puns should enjoy this. As may people who liked the vibe of Cobalt Core, at the risk of setting a roguelike amongst the pigeons. You can find Star Birds on Steam.