Star Clash

Lucky me gets to write the first English review for this Chinese Asteroids ripoff. Star Clash is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Asteroids (Copyright Atari, 1981). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Atari against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Star Clash is considerably worse than Asteroids. This Chinese knockoff does feature a few upgrades, like the ability to choose different planets... yeah, in this game you control planets and your orbiting moons ...

Having a vaguely similar theme to Asteroids (i.e. there is space, rocks and shooting) does not make it "an unabashed, lazy ripoff" like some disgruntled reviewer said. Imagine if the first racing game were the only one allowed because it has a car and a racetrack--it was 2D black and white. This game is more like a combination of Bit Blaster (Adamvision), Bosconian (Namco) and Mad Planets (Gottleib), none of which were accused of ripping off Asteroids. Anyway, like Bit Blaster, this game is mostly about accumulating coins to upgrade your ship...er...planet. Your planet comes with a couple of moons that orbit and auto-fire. The enemy planets don't break up like asteroids, but they do leave bonus objects to collect. The game isn't bound by the screen, but like Bosconian you stay in the center and scroll around a large, and highly populated map. There is plenty of variety in this game, with exotic powerups and exotic enemies, and things to explode everywhere. The music changes when ...