Fresh Steam cozy base building game by Dorfromantik dev and Kurzgesagt launches with discount after 200,000 players flock to free demo
Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell, the YouTube channel famous for using highly polished animations of cute birds to simplify complex topics, has officially launched Star Birds in Steam early access. The new Steam game that drops you into that cute universe featured in the YouTube videos is a mix of cozy game, base-builder, and resource management and automation sim, although the goal was never to be an accurate or in-depth sim.
The Kurzgesagt team says that the goal of Star Birds was to create a “relaxing asteroid base-building and resource management game” that could appeal to both resource management and base-building veterans and newcomers to the genre. It's still early days in an early access launch, but by all accounts, Kurzgesagt and Toukana Interactive — the studio behind Dorfromantik — have managed to achieve that, given the 85% positive review rating. According to the Kurzgesagt team, Star Birds racked up more than 200,000 players during its free Steam demo earlier this year.
Star Birds gameplay and reviews
The gameplay of Star Birds blends typical base-building and resource-management mechanics. You lead a group of space-faring birds on a mission for survival across the galaxy, except instead of the stressful loop of fending off hostile enemies and striving for survival in FPS survival games like Astrometica, Star Birds leans more to the cosy game and satisfactory route. Here, the enjoyment comes from expanding into new territories, gathering materials, crafting new products, and automating production and harvesting as you go. There are no epic boss battles, and the game lets you take things at your own pace.
Like the gameplay, the graphics are far more representative of a cosy game, featuring Kurzgesagt's customary bubbly, vector-like art style and cutesy character and environment designs. You will spend most of your time in Star Birds looking at some rather peculiar asteroids, which makes all of the areas where you'll mine look like a video taken from a 360-degree camera in “tiny world” mode. While the aesthetics all remain the same, the individual asteroids will differ from each other, and each run will feel fresh, thanks to procedural generation. Given the large UI, the low minimum specifications demands, and Platinum ProtonDB score, Star Birds will also pair well with something like the Lenovo Legion Go S (curr. $649.99 on Amazon) running SteamOS.
Star Birds earned itself an 85% positive rating from 185 reviews, which is impressive since those reviews were all racked up in as little as a day. While there are the odd complaints about UI scaling and a handful of bugs — to be expected from a day-one early access game — most reviews praise Star Birds for its fun art style, low barrier to entry, and laid-back cosy gameplay. Star Birds seems like an ideal game to play with kids or for someone who is new to the base-building and resource management genres, and with the 10% launch discount, it comes in at $17.99.
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