Starvester is an idle, strategy, automation, and incremental game where you try to create a space industry and megastructure. Like every idle game, you start slowly, with ordinary clicking, until suddenly you find yourself in a situation where you have everything in abundance and you don't even know where to start, what to develop, improve, or buy first. However, Starvester doesn't help you at all because the more you play, the more options you have, and the number of different resources just keeps increasing. Questions like: should I have upgraded this first or not? Should I wait a bit longer for this or invest somewhere else? constantly ring in your head.
When you start your first world, a huge universe opens up that immediately reminded me of Warframe with its presentation of the universe, only here, of course, there are far fewer details. I believe the idea was similar: you are presented with a practically unlimited universe and just one planet where you start mining your first resource.
At the beginning, you do this by clicking, as in every idle game, but soon drones become available that you will actually be buying throughout the game because they will be the main miners on all the planets you conquer or unlock. Drones are definitely the most important thing in this game. As I mentioned, they do almost all the mining work. You produce them on the first planet, but for each subsequent one, you have to repurpose them to be useful.
Like in every idle game, each purchase or upgrade costs more than the previous one. You also reach a point where progress simply slows down or completely stops, so you get the option to restart with certain permanent upgrades that you have to earn. In this case, these are skill points that unlock new upgrades, and among the best are definitely those that allow faster drone purchases and further increase their efficiency.
The game itself is very addictive and, although it seems trivial and boring at first like all idle titles, after a few minutes of clicking you are already hooked and want to unlock everything just to be able to say: "aha, I've unlocked everything".
Additionally, the music isn't bad at all. It could be better, maybe it is, but I would say it's quite okay for this title.
As for the gameplay, there's not much to add since it's an idle strategy game where you click, collect resources, upgrade everything you want, unlock new things, and so on in a loop. There isn't any mechanic that needs to be particularly highlighted, but precisely because of that monotony, and the feeling of progress itself, the game becomes addictive.
For a title like this, the only downside, in my opinion, is perhaps the duration of the game itself, although I think this can easily be expanded in future versions of the game. I finished the game in about 5 hours of play, which isn't that much for a title like this, but since it's a game set in space, and we know that only space and human stupidity are endless, this game could very easily receive an update that would expand it with another 5 hours of content.
In conclusion, another idle strategy title that is like every other, but, like all others, there's no reason not to give it a chance because it has done well what is expected from such games, which is addiction to development, automation, and, ultimately, clicking.
A copy of the game for review purposes was provided by the publisher Future Friends Games and the development studio Syphono4
