Starwave Defender is an intense top-down shooter based around wave survival built by Brandon Garvin using Unreal Engine 4.

What Is Starwave Defender

Starwave Defender is an intense top-down shooter based around wave survival built by Brandon Garvin using Unreal Engine 4. You have a limited number of lives, however, there are hundreds of enemies coming. Each individual enemy is weak, but they can deal a large amount of damage if you aren’t careful.

The game was originally designed and built for the Android platform, however, it has been revamped for the PC platform. During the testing phase many of the players preferred to play it on their PC using a controller, and eventually I decided to scrap the mobile release due to engine limitations at the time. There are several minor annoyances that come from the original mobile design, which will be fixed in updates planned after release.

Starwave makes an excellent time sink when you’re waiting for something to finish, or just have nothing to do. Most games of Starwave Defender are short, however, you can pause it or stop playing at any time. It has very low resource usage, allowing you to play it when even other resource intensive tasks are running.

Game Controls

Keyboard

Move Up: W
Move Down: S
Move Left: A
Move Right: D

Shoot Up: Up Arrow
Shoot Down: Down Arrow
Shoot Left: Left Arrow
Shoot Right: Right Arrow

Keyboard + Mouse

Move Up: W
Move Down: S
Move Left: A
Move Right: D

Shooting: Left Click to shoot at mouse

Controller

Movement: Left Stick
Shooting: Right Stick

System Requirements

Windows

OS: 64-bit Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10
Processor: 3GHz Dual Core
Memory: 2GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 11 GPU with 1GB VRAM
Storage: 500MB available space

Linux

OS: 64-bit, only Ubuntu 14.04 tested
Processor: 3GHz Dual Core
Memory: 2GB RAM
Graphics: GPU with OpenGL 4.3 and 1GB VRAM
Storage: 500MB available space

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR LINUX USERS: This game requires OpenGL 4.3, meaning if you are running an AMD GPU you must be running the proprietary drivers! The open source drivers do not yet support OpenGL 4.3!