REVIEW: Starwhal

“What the hell is a Starwhal? Is that like a space whale?” was literally the first thing I said when I heard of the game’s title. Funnily enough, in fact, that’s exactly what the game is. A narwhal, in case you didn’t know, is a whale with a horn. Starwhal, then, is a horny space whale.

At its core, Starwhal is a local multiplayer game for up to four players. If you don’t have enough friends, the AI will fill in. Immediately evident is the vast customization options that are available for you to laugh at before you start to battle it out. You can outfit your whale with any number of different colors, hats and costumes. Let your imagination run wild and you’ve got yourself a party.

Just as an example, while playing with my son we were trying to decide whether to use a red light saber horn with a cheeseburger outfit or the blue light saber horn with a ballerina tutu. The customization options are so vast, in fact, it took me a while to decide which one we wanted to use because so many of them looked so funny that it was hard to make the final decision.

With the availability of 55 different customized head options and 65 differnt body combinations to go with the 7 separate color varieties, that boils down to a huge final count of 25,025 different combinations at your disposal! You can even have your Starwhal ridden by one 19 different members of the development team as well. It’s this type of variety and ingenuity that had us loving Starwhal before we even jumped into a match quite frankly.

There are two main modes in Starwhal, Versus and Challenges. In Versus you compete with up to four players at once or alone against 3 A.I. bots. You can choose from a total of four different Versus modes being Classic, Score Attack, Zones and Heart Throb.

• Classic – Lets you compete against your opponents to see who can be the last Starwhal left swimming, or flying, not sure which is correct actually.
• Score Attack – Set the goal and be the first Starwhal to get to that score to win.
• Zones – Capture the points by touching the center node and changing it to the color of your Starwhal. First to hit the zone at the set goal wins.
• Heart Throb – Grab the heart with your Starwhal and be the first one to hold it for the set amount of seconds to win.

Each mode lets you choose from the same variable in match ranging from the score required to win, time for each match, whether it’s free-for-all or team mode and how many rounds each match goes.

Starwhal also allows you to choose from five different zones to play in with each zone having five individual areas to play in. One zone has six areas making for a total of 26 different game maps in the game itself. The zones themselves are:

• Asteroid X – Purple, desolate planet.
• Magnus – Volcano covered fire planet.
• Spacetopus – Exactly what it sounds like, an octopus in space map.
• Neo Flopicron – Lush, foresty type planet.
• Forsaken – Ice covered planet.

One thing that is evident about Starwhal is that it completely proves the modern premise of solo play being preparation for multiplayer. Now, in games like Call of Duty and the like this is rarely true. In Starwhal, however, trust me you’ll want to play the challenge solo mode first if only to get used to the controls. Remember, the game takes place in space so there is little gravity.

At first glance the controls are simple: Press A to move and the D-pad left and right turns you. It sounds simpler than it is, actually, as you’ll quickly be reminded of the game Asteroids while playing. Hitting left on the D-pad will turn your Starwhal left but it will keep going left until you turn back right due to the lack of gravity in space. If you start to move with the A button while spinning then, you guessed it, you’re just spinning around the screen. Just like in Asteroids, Starwhal requires a delicate and steady balance on the D-pad continuously while playing along with a tempered use of the A button for thrust. It takes a bit of getting used to but thankfully the challenge mode is there for us to iron out our skills in.

In the solo challenge mode there are options of Obstacles and Targets. As the names state, you must either get from start to finish by avoiding obstacles or tagging targets in a set amount of time in order to win a Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze medal. They are arranged over easy, medium and hard difficulty levels with 16 challenges in total among the three (all have 5, medium has 6).

The good thing is each one takes a matter of seconds and you can replay them at any time to try and get the higher medal. You really should play these to get used to the control system as noted because it gets incredibly difficult in multiplayer. The right D-pad will turn you right but if you go too far you will flip in a circle and lose all your forward momentum. If you need to go back left, you will turn with the left D-pad but you’ll only start coming back once all the right turning momentum you had is used up.

The other players in Starwhal often make you alter your course of movement. For example, if I’m moving right and another AI whale or player hits me backwards, my movement stops and I’ll need to get going from scratch again. Add this to the frustratingly fun control scheme and you have classic local co-op fun amidst yelling “ARRGHHH I didn’t turn that way!” all the while laughing at your friends’ hysterical Starwhal outfits.

The scoring in Starwhal all focuses around your heart which is located on the bottom of your character. In games like Classic, Score Attack and Heart Throb you’ll need to use your Starwhal’s horn to strike the heart in order to score a point and whoever has the most points at the end of their respective mode wins. In Zones, you’ll need to keep hitting the center circle with the heart enclosed inside in order to get a point and raise your score.

We found ourselves switching back and forth from trying to get the zone covered and flying full speed into another Starwhal to prevent it from stealing the zone to their color. Heart Throb is the easiest mode to win as we found a pretty nifty little work around for it and, to our surprise, it netted us an achievement. Immediately upon starting up the Heart Throb mode grab the heart and sink to bottom of the map.

Since your heart is on the bottom of your character, you’ll be resting on it and therefore it will be inaccessible to your opponents. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing and as soon as the counter hits the limit you win and the “MINE, MINE MINE!” achievement is yours for winning the mode being the only one to hold the heart.

If you are the type of person who gets frustrated easily then my advice is to take it slowly. I’m serious. As fun as Starwhal is I had to take deep breaths multiple times to prevent me from launching my custom controller into a wall. The odd thing is that I loved it. In the challenge mode you’ll find yourself yelling ungodly outbursts as you fail yet again at the very last second of a hard challenge.

Since the game takes place in space with little gravity, hitting an obstacle will cause you to flip all over to the point where it’s literally impossible to recover and complete the challenge. Your only hope is to restart and hope you have better luck. For what it’s worth, we completed all 16 of the challenges, but the ones on hard difficulty are simply torturish. It’s bad enough that the control system is as challenging as it is but the obstacles making it an immediate failure time wise in order to win a medal opposed to simply a hinderance makes it frustrating.

Now, I know this sounds bad but the ironic thing is that it’s not. In fact, as frustrated as I was I found myself laughing most of the time with that “you’ve got to be kidding me” laugh. Each failure, however, I kept going because Starwhal absolutely ACES the “Ok, just one more time” mentality. You know, that mindset where no matter how many times you die you keep saying “Ok, one more time” and before you know it you have 50 “Ok, one more times” before you finally beat it? Yeah, that one.

Summary

The heart of Starwhal’s fun lies in the multiplayer and local co-op. You’re constantly trying to figure out just what the hell is going on with four Starwhals flopping all over, while laughing at your friends’ Starwhal that’s wrapped in bacon and has an afro. Whether it’s by yourself or together at a party, Starwhal will leave you frustrated beyond belief in a way that will simply just make you laugh. Although the hard challenges were a little too hard, overall Starwhal hits the nail on the head (or whale on the blowhole?) and is definitely a game you should play.

Starwhal is available now on the Xbox Store for $12.