Star Blaster: Shooting Game

Star Blaster's cover art looks like a kid's toy box, so we opened it planning to give it ten minutes. We ended up playing for over an hour. It's a top-down roguelike shooter where you guide an astronaut through wave after wave of rebellious toy machines. The first surprise is that you never press a fire button, not once.

The brakes came sooner than we expected. Just as we were getting into it, the energy bar ran dry: it only holds thirty points, and every battle costs exactly five. Play straight through and you get six battles; the rest of the evening has to be paid for with ads or diamonds. That's also when you understand where the game plans to make its money.

Thirty waves, a gun that fires itself, and your only job is standing in the right place

Each stage is a vertical corridor split into thirty waves. The top-left corner shows the current wave, the middle shows your character level and the right shows the match timer. Your character locks onto the nearest target and fires nonstop, so for the whole round you just keep one finger on the screen and drag to move.

So the challenge isn't aiming, it's positioning. The toys crawl up from the bottom edge in clusters; some charge straight at you, others hang back and spray long trails of bullets. On wave ten a boss shows up with a red health bar stretched across the top of the screen. Your starting character has just three hundred HP and seventy-five damage, so a few beats in the wrong spot and the round is over.

Between waves, the game drops a glowing gold chest. It took us a few minutes to figure this one out: the chest doesn't fly into your pocket by itself; you have to walk over it. Until you pick it up, the next wave won't start; the clock keeps running while the wave counter sits still.

Mike Quest does your shooting, and the other five want fifty shards each

The starting character is Mike Quest, whom the game sums up as young, fit and handsome, and a scientist who knows the universe inside out. The roster has five more characters, each with two skills of their own. But all five sit at zero out of fifty shards, meaning you need to collect fifty shards for that particular character to unlock them.

That number says a lot about the long-term pace. For your first few sessions you'll only have Mike, and every power gain comes through gear rather than switching characters. That's not necessarily bad, because gear is where the game gives you the most to tinker with.

The inventory eats more time than the stages do

Your character has six gear slots, from helmet, gun and gloves to armor and boots. After a little over an hour our inventory held thirty-two items, most of them junk. The game makes up for it with a merge button that combines several items of the same type into a rarer one, plus a rarity filter to keep things readable.

Two more layers wait beyond that. Gems slot into gear for extra stats, and the Card Vault is a cabinet full of question-mark slots split into Power Cards and Relics. Opening each slot costs five hundred gold.

All told, this is a game where a round lasts a few minutes but the closet behind it is deep enough to tinker with all evening. Most of our actual playtime went into the inventory screen, not the shooting.

Thirty energy is six battles, and after that the game invites you to pay

Tap the energy bar and the game opens a two-option panel and states the prices up front. The left column gives five free points for watching one ad, three times a day, so you get only three extra battles a day. The right column gives twenty points for a hundred diamonds, and that one allows up to nineteen times a day.

A hundred diamonds is exactly the cheapest top-up pack, priced at $0.99. In other words, four extra battles cost you about a dollar. The price list above keeps going up to $99 for an 18,000-diamond pack. Gold is also sold for diamonds: ten thousand gold for two hundred diamonds, a hundred thousand gold for two thousand.

To be fair, the first four top-up packs all give double on your first purchase. The game also still hands out a free bag of a thousand gold every day. But the thing that really stops you at eleven at night is the energy bar and nothing else.

The mod removes exactly those four sore spots

The four switches in the MOD menu line up neatly with the four annoyances above. We re-tested each one on a real phone rather than copying from old notes. All four work the same way: flip the switch, then fully quit and reopen the game, because changing it and hitting replay inside a battle won't take effect.

God Mode is the most obvious. We parked the character motionless in the middle of a swarm for fourteen minutes, right through the wave-ten boss. The health bar stayed at three hundred without budging a pixel. Monsters and chests still broke as usual, so the round never stalled.

Play without energy turns the number at the top of the screen into 999, and it stays there after you start a battle. With Auto-pick upgrade cards, every level-up the game takes a card itself and closes the panel without you tapping anything. The trade-off is that the pause screen shows five identical cards, because the mod always takes the same one.

The last one is Free shopping, and we scrutinized it the hardest, because a pretty number on screen isn't necessarily spendable. The wallet held 50,050 diamonds. Tapping the $0.99 pack took it to 50,250, and tapping the $4.99 pack on top of that took it to 51,550, with no payment dialog ever appearing.

Once received, it has to be spent to count. We traded two hundred diamonds for ten thousand real gold; the gold landed in the wallet immediately and the diamonds dropped by exactly two hundred. After fully closing and reopening the game, the balance was still there rather than snapping back.

What it's like to actually play

The biggest plus is how easy it is to get into. The language list has fifteen languages, and you can sign in with a Google account or just play as a guest. The rounded toy shapes are fun to look at, and each round lasts only a few minutes, so it's perfect while waiting for the bus or for dinner.

The downsides are real too. Since the character shoots by itself, most of the time you're just sliding a finger back and forth to dodge, which gets monotonous over long sessions. Power growth is also tightly tied to grinding gear, so the middle stretch drags a bit if you don't enjoy merging items.

We also tried airplane mode and restarted from scratch. The game went straight to the main screen and played a full stage normally, so losing signal on a train or bus is no problem. On the app store, the game held 4.8 stars from 2,800 ratings and more than five hundred thousand downloads. That's a solid showing for a game that's still fairly little known.

So who should download it?

If you're looking for a light game to play in short bursts, enjoy gear-collecting roguelikes and don't mind a character that shoots on its own, Star Blaster is a pleasant pick. It doesn't demand much of your hands, and it doesn't make you memorize anything before you start.

And if you once downloaded it and quit because of that thirty-point energy bar, or because you kept dying to the wave-ten boss, the mod here removes exactly those two things. Play as many battles as you like in one sitting, and stand in the middle of the swarm without losing HP. The diamond wallet is also thick enough to try everything in the closet without doing the math.