The game's been on shelves for a few weeks now and Gamerankings still doesn't list a single review so I've become curious.
Apparently it's made by Ascaron and hasn't been released outside of Germany yet. There's a
German language demo and so far it didn't crash, which is surprising considering the track record of most German dev studios.
The gameplay is pretty much like Freelancer (freelance space sim like Elite for those who haven't heard of it): A few big stations that trade everything with no real economy. Your ship is very powerful, I've torn a group of military fighters to pieces using the default equipment and with the two level 2 weapons I have now most enemies are toast in seconds. That may be justified since you ARE flying a super powerful ship but still. Apropos ship, you can level that thing up and it even has a skill tree for the "plasma launcher" that gives you nice support spells like instant weapon energy reload, time stopper or EMP.
Travelling resembles Elite in that you have a star map and a hyper drive that can jump within a certain range but unlike Elite you don't have to land and buy new fuel for the thing, it recharges automatically. Trading isn't too profitable since you can't load much and the goods you can trade aren't very valuable (thus giving maybe 1-2k profit per run), plus the chance of a pirate attack is really high. Fight missions are REALLY profitable (10k a piece).
Faction standing is kinda GTA-like, you can accumulate a 5 star threat ranking very fast and lose it after some time automatically (as opposed to pretty much every other space trading sim where your rank is permanent and you have to actively work on it to make friends with a hostile faction again). Makes attacking civil vessels more feasible since it doesn't ruin your life permanently.
Best feature over Freelancer are random missions/events that happen when you enter a system. Once I jumped into a system and a group of bounty hunters asked me to help them with some pirates, another time a research station asked me to investigate a satelite that gave them strange readings. There's also bad stuff, once military fighters declared my 70 tons of Videogames that I spent my whole money on as illegal goods (thank you, Jack Thompson!) and demanded that I drop the container. That I did, "It's nice to see a law abiding citizen in this age". Generally dropping containers when threatened is helpful, you have to drop it for battle anyway and if the enemy thinks you are cooperating that means you get the first strike. 5 star crime ranking as a result but oh well, it went down to 2-3 in a few minutes.
No station building, no effective economy and no fair battles so it's not going to beat X in the arena of "you can do anything" but it can definitely beat Freelancer. I've read people complain about the setting not being as believable as Freelancer but really, who plays freeform space sims for the story? I wish it had station building and multiplayer or at least mod support (the EULA explicitely disallows mods, though that may apply only to the demo). And for some reason the graphics require quite some processing power but don't look much better than X-BTF or Freespace.
Topic: Darkstar One? (Read 1844 times)
