A fantasy sci fi spaceship simulator game with epic battles, RPG elements and a space trader system.
The galaxy is your playground as you take the role of Kayron Jarvis, exploring space and looking for clues to unlock the secrets of your father's death. Darkstar One is designed to include freedom of choice and is intended to create many options on how the story is played out. You can take many different approaches to earning cash and upgrades including trading, mercenary work, smuggling, pirating, or any combination that suits your playing style.Over 200 weapons such as rockets, torpedoes, mines, equipment, and shield upgrades may be purchased, taken, or traded. Your ship, for example, can be upgraded and altered to create a battle cruiser, or fast attack boat. When gaining experience, your special 'spell weapon' will become more powerful and versatile as you traverse more than 400 solar systems populated by six species of alien. Special missions feature exploring canyons and other surfaces of strange planets.DarkStar One is a space-sim shooter in the vein of X3: Reunion and Freelancer. In the game, a young hotshot human pilot (who else?) named Kayron traverses the galaxy to search for his slain father's murderer.
On his journey, Kayron crosses into hundreds of systems, encounters thousands of other ships, and meets beings of half a dozen different species.The star of the game is not Kayron, however, it is his ship, the mysterious and powerful DarkStar One. Inherited from his father, the DarkStar One is able to adapt any type of ship technology as its own. Additionally, the ship can be upgraded via pulsing green crystals harvested from deep within space asteroids.
The upgrading scheme can be addictive, and I often found myself pursuing upgrade crystals at the expense of missions and stories.The main storyline is complex, and revolves around tracking down a mercenary responsible for the death of Kayron's father. While tracking him down, Kayron will be forced to choose his path through the galaxy. Because the ship can be upgraded to suit a number of roles and the open-ended universe allows for many different choices to be made, Kayron's possibilities are abundant. Calmer, more tactical players may choose to turn the DarkStar One into a heavy trading vessel, while more aggressive types can choose between fighting for or against justice, as a bounty hunter or pirate. Players in the middle ground can become mercenaries, fulfilling missions in each trade station (typically search and rescue-type missions, but with a good deal of sabotage thrown in). For the budding revolutionaries playing DarkStar One, the game's political system allows you to become an operative in the employ of one of the galaxy's political factions, destroying enemies, intimidating merchants, and assassinating rival officials.There are hundreds of planets to explore-though you only get to fly over the surface of a few. The rest of the planets are explored via their trade and research stations.
While the lack of planetary exploration may be disappointing for some, it is important to note that the game is all about space. Ascaron has done a fantastic job of putting a vast, realistic galaxy into perspective. Satellites, moons, binary planet systems, and stars all make beautiful appearances alongside each race's unique architecture and ship design.The DarkStar One can be controlled via mouse or joystick.
While the joystick does suffice for 80% of the movements you'll make, I often found myself switching to the mouse for more precision. There are also a number of controls that can be toggled with the keyboard, activated via the on-screen interface, or assigned to a joystick button. Unless you're a real die-hard for realism, a mouse will get the job done fine.Simply playing through the story-which you must do to unlock the full map-will ensure you get a hearty dose of this game's bread and butter: space combat. If you've played much of the X-Wing or TIE Fighter series from LucasArts, you'll be familiar with the basic premise of space battle. Because of the qualities of your ship, at less difficult settings you can literally fly circles around your adversaries early on. However, as you encounter more advanced races their ability to out-maneuver you will become apparent.
Battling five ships with weapons as advanced as your own will seem unbalanced, and may be deadly, if you don't utilize the most powerful feature of the DarkStar One: the plasma cannon.As an addition to the turrets, missile launchers, and various heavy weapons able to be equipped to the DarkStar One, the plasma cannon is a formidable threat to your enemies. The plasma cannon has unlimited uses (though it must recharge for about a minute between uses) and will provide an added feature to your offenses or defenses. A shield boost and cocoon-like energy shield will allow you to take significantly more damage and ram other ships, respectively, and an EMP cannon can disable the weapons of your adversaries as they charge at you, throttles punched to 100%.Battle is consistently fast and intense-by hour three of your gameplay, you may notice your heart rate quickening with the game's alternating tracks of fight music.
Since you may be battling hundreds (or thousands, even) of enemies if you've elected to be a bounty hunter, the fights can become repetitive, especially considering that the radio chatter in battles, while unique to each race, is limited to about 15 different statements. Additionally, your co-pilot-a very curvy redhead with a spotty history-will consistently chime in at the least opportune moments.
As red lights are flashing and the ship's computer is alerting you that you're about to become space dust, she'll contribute valuable insights like 'We've got to get this Hunter off our tail!' Where's a strong-but-silent Wookiee when you need one?DarkStar One clocks in between 20 and 40 hours, depending on how thoroughly you plan on playing it.
It is the game's required length for the storyline that will turn away many who would otherwise be enthused to play. The addition of more side quests that would force the players to take stands in the galaxy's ongoing political conflicts, or more in-depth involvement in the career system (how about tracking down a pirate, rather than being fed his current position via omnipresent informants?) would make this a much more engaging title.
There's a string of dialogue between Kayron and a companion destined for a space funeral about how each step in Kayron's journey involves several similar side quests, and you're forced to laugh, because at that point you'll have many hours of repetitive gameplay behind you.It is DarkStar One's repetitiveness that decimates its chances with anyone other than space-sim buffs. While the game excellently provides a sense of depth and vastness to space, and both looks and sounds wonderful, you'll have experienced every bit of innovation available halfway through the game. While it's addicting, the gameplay just isn't varied enough to fulfill the game's potential greatness, nor keep you engaged for the game's lengthy storyline.
Here's a thought for you: we've been waiting for the next Elite for over twenty years now. No, not literally. We got that when Frontier appeared, and that wasn't the next Elite in the way we're currently yabbering about. What it means is a game which immediately and obviously dominates the gaming landscape and consumes the social life of pretty much everyone.Clearly, the Elite successors that have appeared have had localised effects. Reading this they'll be veterans of Frontier or Privateer or X: Beyond the Frontier who still bear the scars in their personal history, scabby months in a darkened room in an uncomfortable seat saving the universe and making enormous profits. Hell: there's the ever-growing community of Eve Online who've decided to retreat from the real-world into a universe where laser death lights the heavens (with a side-order of mining). But all of these are peripheral concerns, outside the main thrust of the culture.So maybe times have just changed?
It's a game which may have worked once, but no more - but then look at (say) Civilzation, which, generation after generation, gains a new fanbase and reclaims the centre. What's different about Elite Clones?After about four hours with Darkstar One an idea struck me. What's different about Elite Clones? They're too different. They're trying too hard. Now, Darkstar One is far from a perfect game, but it immediately excited and engaged me in a way that no recent other Elite clone managed. Compare to when I started playing X3 and I was actually glad that my 3D card was coughing blood while running it so I could lob it back at Kristan with a 'Sorry, chum' note attached.
I Realllllly couldn't be bothered wrestling with it. This level of Asteroids is impossible.But with Darkstar One, I'm away, in a far away galaxy shooting pirates who are quite near, actually.The point being: Elite, for all its scale, action and variety, was a simple game.And Darkstar One is likewise.(Or I may be biased, because the lead character's name is pronounced identically to mine, which is always good for a few giggles.)Darktstar One is an Elite Clone We've got that already - Ed positioning you as a freshly trained flight recruit who's trying to find out who offed his dear old Pa. Luckily, he left him a prototype space-ship, the Darkstar One. Between trying to gain information, you're free to explore, take on missions, trade between planets, indulge in a little harmful piracy or harmless piracy and generally get into trouble. Cash gained can be used to improve your ship's equipment, getting increasingly powerful weaponry and so on.Elite Clone! Woosh!But where it could obfuscate, it chooses to simplify.
For example, trade. Games like X take great pride in making enormously intricate economic systems which move constantly and realistically. Darkstar One doesn't bother. Planets have a selection of things they make, which will normally be cheaper than average. If you make sure your destination doesn't make it too, you'll normally turn a profit. Bad if it were a pure economic trading game, but it's more something you can play around with to earn a little extra coin.
You don't need to sit and calculate anything complicated, so - in actual practice - you're more likely to actually dabble. Low entrance fee in terms of attention for instant rewards. And no matter how slow-paced a game may be, there's nothing wrong with instant rewards.Ship improvement keeps things focused too. Rather than swapping ships depending on your finances, Darkstar One has experimental organic technology that allows it to upgrade. When you find one of its canisters - normally inside a (labeled) asteroid - you can choose whether you want to expand your hull, engines or wings, allowing you to specialise towards weaponry or cargo-hauling or whatever. Married to this is the actual special plasma abilities, which are improved and unlocked in a skill-tree akin to Diablo or World of Warcraft.The environment itself, while leaving room to explore and take on missions by yourself, slowly unveils the galaxy as jump-gate co-ordinates are gifted to you or a more powerful engine installed.
The expanding canvas is tightly integrated into the game's narrative, which is where you can see the strings pulling the puppets. Your ship's bought upgrades are limited according to what level your ship's been improved with its experimental organic technology. This means that even if you grind out a mass of money in a small area of space, until you manage to find the strictly limited organic upgrades, you can't turn it into a top of the range ship. It stops the game becoming a walkover (either way), but does lose a little of Elite's free spirit.
Being an Elite game, we're grateful for a time-dilation ability right from the off.The key element of the game, of course, is combat and here it excels. It picks up where Freelancer left off with its mouse aiming and steering, but also includes a more traditional joystick options. It also allows you to thrust to the side in a strafe-banner and apply afterburners or high-power breaks.
The latter allows you to swivel on the spot (or even as you reverse). It's certainly a considerable advantage, perhaps vaguely justified by the game's fiction, that despite being in space everyone else flies like atmospheric craft while you can do this zero-G snazziness. To some it may be too much of an advantage, but when you get involved in mass firefights between the rebels and the forces of order, you'll be looking for any edge you can get.Compared to many of its peers, Darkstar One may seem slight - but what it does, it does expertly. There's a few problem areas which prevent it climbing to real greatness. Primarily, while the visual side of things is perfectly acceptable, the audio is a complete state. It's been lumbered with the sort of wooden voice-acting that make Orlando Bloom sound like Orson Welles, sounding openly comical when discussing matters of serious import.
It may as well be going 'Dad's dead,' 'Oh dear,' 'Yeah,' for all the drama. Secondly, for the dream Elite game, it's leaning too much to the simple side.
It's fine having tight reigns on exploration, but when the actual space you're stuck inside has so little to do. Well, if you include an asteroid you can fly inside, you better be sure to stick something of interest in most of them. This is one for the Luke Skywalkers rather than the James T Kirks of the space-sim world.Which leaves us with a lighter-than-gravity Elite Clone that's positively welcoming to all and sundry. There's nothing cold in this part of outer space.