Starstride is a greatest hits album of everything I hate about mobile gacha games

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SHOULD I PLAY STARSTRIDE?

No. Starstride is a semi-functional mess of a sci-fi gacha game that presents an incoherent, generic story centered around simplistic MMO-style quests and button-mashing monster hunts. When it works, it involves watching your character auto-run to the next quest-giving NPC, who spouts a bit of hastily translated story at you before giving you an assignment to kill four spiders or hunt a monster in a bowling alley-sized instance encounter. The world is nonsensical, the characters are lifeless and dull, and none of it is fun.

TIME PLAYED

I played about an hour and a half of Starstride, which was about as much as I could stand. Most of the time that I was able to play was wasted as I simply watched my character automatically run to the next quest objective.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT STARSTRIDE?

• A nice selection of weapon types. Similar to the Monster Hunter series, Starstride’s classes are based on weapon selection: Some weapons work better for a defensive play style, while others are a better fit for offense, and still others are a balance between the two. I chose the balanced spear for my character, but other options included a sword and shield, a greatsword, and a massive warhammer.

• Hunting big boss monsters is a neat idea, at least.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT ABOUT STARSTRIDE?

• It barely works. With the early beta build I played, I was routinely disconnected from the servers while talking to NPCs or transitioning between zones. On their own, disconnects aren’t a big deal—Starstride would drop me right back where I had been when it happened. It was happening so often, though, that I struggled to make progress at some points, and struggled even more coming up with the motivation to keep trying.

• Boring quests. A button dedicated to running to the next quest waypoint is a huge red flag for me: Why have this feature in a game that’s fun to play on its own? Starstride seems to realize that none of its quests are interesting at all, and let me turn on autopilot as my character walked from quest-giver to destination and back again. It would run me right up to herds of passive wildlife when I had to do things like kill a certain number of wolves, and even through the instances where I was supposed to be hunting down boss monsters.

• The dungeons are pointless. Speaking of boss instances, the dungeons they spawn in are straight-line affairs, and I could just walk straight through them without most of the low-level monsters taking any notice of me at all. I couldn’t help but wonder what the point was, and I might have thought the game was deliberately wasting my time—if I felt that Starstride was doing anything deliberately.

• Incoherent, generic story. Starstride’s narrative lost me immediately. The premise is about humanity finding a “super Earth” somewhere out in the galaxy, possibly on an asteroid, but characters all seemed to be talking about completely incompatible versions of this world, and I quickly lost any interest in figuring out what they were on about. One character mentioned something called the Mothman before saying she had just gotten back from the “third dimension” and sending me out to kill a giant komodo dragon for reasons that weren’t clear. Generally it seems like NPCs spout sci-fi gibberish and women wear skimpy sci-fi fetish gear, and that’s about all the plot there really is.

• Dull, button-mashing combat. Every fight in Starstride was the same: I’d approach a monster, wail on it a bit, then tap dodge to avoid its slow, telegraphed attack. Or not, because it didn’t matter. I could also just mash the three or four active buttons on the right side of the screen and eventually I’d win.

• Same soulless gacha mechanics, same grind, no payoff. I didn’t actually earn any gacha tickets yet during my time with Starstride, but the grind was already obvious. You already know what to expect from Starstride if you’ve played any second-rate gacha game in the past year. This is just like those, only worse.

PLATFORM TESTED

Android on Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G phone.