Star Birds

After the glorious Dorfromantik, I was always going to be interested in whatever Toukana Interactive made next. That puzzle game was so perfectly balanced, so beautifully realised, that I was immediately confident that whatever they followed it up with would be worth my time. Surprisingly, that follow-up turned out to be something pretty different: Star Birds is an asteroid base-building and resource management game in which you play as a spaceship full of birds out to discover the mysteries of the galaxy.

Now, resource management games aren’t always my jam. They can get convoluted and messy quite quickly, and I don’t always mesh with that kind of vibe, and Star Birds doesn’t escape that trope either. While the game takes it easy on you in the first couple of sectors, you’ll need to keep a clear mind and organise everything you’re building well to not lose sight of what’s going on. I once put my game down for a little while, and when I came back to it, I had to figure out what exactly I had been doing.

The reason for this is that each sector presents a number of different asteroids you’ll have to mine. Each asteroid presents a different set of resources, and you will need all of them to make your way through space. Some of them are needed just to make more money or get more science points – which allows you to discover new asteroids or research new buildings – but others are more important to the story of the game. Every so often, you’ll find an excavation site where you’ll need to uncover a MacGuffin that sets the plot in motion.

So it’s up to you to build the correct buildings in the correct places, gather the right resources to complete missions, and even interchange some of your resources from one asteroid to another. A lot of this is puzzle work. You’ll have pipes running from one machine to another, but pipes can’t cross each other, so it’s up to you to figure out the layout of each asteroid. You’ll also need to keep track of which resource you need where, as plenty of resources cannot be found naturally but have to be made by combining others.

If this sounds a little complicated, that’s due to two factors: I’m not always the best at explaining things straightforwardly, but also just because it can actually get quite difficult. The menus – and the in-game wiki especially – help with figuring out what you need, but these aren’t always the easiest to navigate. In one level, I needed to make a certain part for my space station, for which I needed two resources. But those resources were made of different other resources, which I needed to make with a different building. But then those resources needed to be made as well. But if I wanted to find out how to make anything, I had to take a look at the mission at hand and cycle back from there through all of the steps. It’s not the most intuitive of things, but hopefully it’s something that can be improved upon during the game’s time in early access.

It might sound like I’m being quite critical of Star Birds, but if I’m honest, that’s only because I believe in the game’s potential. There’s so much to love here already, from the cute birds you’re playing as to the game’s writing, which is actually quite funny, to the way the base-building works just really, really well. I played the game on Steam Deck, which might not have been the ideal way (I do believe playing on PC with mouse and keyboard will make this an even better experience overall), and it was still incredibly enjoyable.

Buildings snap into place just beautifully, and it’s never unclear why something won’t go where you want to put it. If you’ve made a mistake, you can easily destroy your building and put it in the correct place – although the ability to just move the building would be much more appreciated. It’s easy to see which resources can be found where, although it can become slightly tough to keep everything organised once your bases get bigger.

Star Birds is a visual delight in general as well, with its use of darker colours offset by the brightness of what you bring to the place really invoking that sense of adventure that comes with space travel. The birds themselves look adorable as well, and I like how they’re not limited to just cutscenes. While you’re working away on your asteroids, they will chime in with new missions, like having to research new buildings to use or changes to the overall mission.

One of my favourite parts of the game is that it is story-based. The developers are planning on adding randomly generated expedition levels, which will boost the game’s replayability to infinity, but I do enjoy playing an actual story here. It gives you a sense of adventure and something to strive for other than just high scores, which I barely ever chase. I’m very appreciative of the story mode here.

I do really enjoy what Star Birds has to offer already, and with the developers promising 2-3 updates during its time in early access, I’m incredibly excited to find out what else will be added next. If that means even more meat to the story mode, I would love that, but with the developers’ history on their side, I’m sure whatever they add will be worth your time.