Starbirds is a shoot'em up game in the style of old AMIGA shooters like R-Type, Apidya, Wings of Death and many others. The game play is simple: the player controls a space ship (called the Starbird) and tries to keep alive, which is best ensured by shooting as many enemies as possible.

Starbirds features four horizontally scrolling levels, each packed with a huge amount of enemies and guarded by an extra-large boss enemy with big shields and power. The levels are constructed in a way that there are a lot of turn-off's which allow the player to take another path each time.

A special feature of Starbirds is the weapon system, which was inspired by action games like Wings of Death and Lethal Xcess. There are two categories of weapons, primary and secondary weapons. Each category consists of 8 different types of weapons, four of each category are selected by the player before entering the first level. The player can decide at every time if the approaching enemies should be attacked using the primary or secondary weapon. By repeated pressing of the fire button the primary weapon is fired, by holding down the button the secondary weapon is fired.

The currently active weapon can be changed by collecting weapon symbols, which are left behind from exploding enemies quite often. Blue symbols represent primary weapons, red symbols secondary weapons. Every weapon has five different powers. If a symbol is collected, which represents one of the currently active weapons, then its power increases by one. Therefore it is advantageous to collect the same symbol several times in order to get a weapon with high power. On the other hand, changing a weapon reduces the power by one, therefore too many changes without intermediate power-up quickly lead to a poorly armed space ship with little chance of survival.

The Starbird space ship does not survive hits with enemies, their shots or with the background. Fortunately the player has six space ships available and he can restart the game three times in the last visited level. The game supports four levels of difficulty, which can be selected in the main screen, before entering the first level. Finally the game can even be played by two players simultaneously.