Steredenn: Binary Stars – PS5 Review

Steredenn: Binary Stars is a horizontally-scrolling shoot ’em up from Pixelnest Studio, a two-person team based in France.  It follows on from 2015’s original Steredenn but rather than being a whole new game, this is more of an enhanced version of the original.

On the face of it, this is a pretty typical shoot ’em up.  It’s you vs. an entire armada of alien ships and there’s not particularly much in the way of a storyline.  But that said, this isn’t exactly simple in terms of all the mechanics going on and this enhanced version adds to that somewhat.

Your basic controls are what you’d expect.  You move with the left stick or d-pad and shoot with the button and you’ll be dodging bullets, shooting enemies and taking on bosses.  But where the game gets more interesting is in its really complex weapon system set-up.  The way it works is that you pick a ship, from a selection of five, and along the way you’ll find weapon pick-ups along the way which you can then pick up by pressing the  button.

These weapons span a wide range of types such as bullet, heavy and energy guns as well as a range of automated bot weapons.  You have two weapon slots and you can equip different any type of weapon in each of them and then switch between them with the  button.  It’s an okay system in theory but with cooldowns to manage and lots of enemy firepower to contend with, it can all become a bit of a handful.  Rather than having a button to switch weapons, why not just split them between the fire and switch buttons, allowing you to access both guns at will.  It’d definitely be a lot less faff.

You’ve also got a ship-specific function too, which is mapped to , and that changes depending on what ship you’ve picked.  From short teleportation, melee-ranged attack and bot support functionality, it’s all fine in theory but in practise what you get from these abilities isn’t worth the hassle of using them.  And that speaks to something of a disconnect between the complexity of your ship’s mechanics and then the simplicity of the game itself.

With it’s simple chunky pixel visuals and samey-looking levels, the actual meat of the game is quite ordinary.  It plays well but there’s not much in the way of dynamic action, interesting set-pieces or creative level design here.  Just a straightforward set of randomly-generated stages that never seem to change the scenery, give you anything to interact with or mix up any of the mechanics.  It’s just level after level of pretty staid shooting action punctuated with some very bullet-spongey bosses that take a while to put down but never seem to offer up anything all that impressive or original.  Just one big space ship after another.

We also found everything to be a bit unbalanced.  Certain ships made completing the game (well, a loop of the game) easier than others.  Indeed, we only had proper success with the ‘Specialist’ ship which exclusively uses auto-firing bot weapons.  The more traditional ships all suffer because of the fact that the game will sometimes just blast you with a big un-telegraphed laser.  So tucking away in the corner while letting your bots target the enemy is a lot safer.

The difficulty might put some off too.  It’s not the hardest shoot ’em up out there but the randomness of it, combined with some well-armoured enemies, will definitely make it a challenge for more casual players.  And when runs can take 30-40 minutes per loop, it can be a bit much having to start again from scratch.  The game has some ‘rogue-like’ branding to it but maybe a bit of ‘rogue-lite’ post-game progression would have been nice to have too.  But after a while, the feeling of having to start again with your ship’s default weapon feels like a bit of a chore.

There are some extra features to break it up though.  There’s a co-op mode, Boss Rush and Arena modes (which both see you taking on bosses essentially) and a Daily Run mode for when you want a quick bit of global leaderboard action.  And as an upgrade to the original Steredenn, this does pack in quite a bit of new stuff which should make existing fans happy.

But, look, we generally like shoot ’em ups and we can overlook flaws if we’re having fun and for a while we definitely were.  Aside from the occasional spike in difficulty, we generally enjoyed flying, shooting, dying, learning and trying again and we did feel like we improved along the way, which is sort of the point.  But it felt like all the new weapon choices, many of which make you a much less effective fighter, kept distracting us from the main tasks of killing and surviving.  If the game was a bit more interesting and the weapon system was a bit dulled down, you’d have a much better, more intuitive game.