DarkStar One (PC)

There is a wealth of missions on offer, these range from shooting up pirates to taking photographs of various space based objects, some of these will have a sting in the tail so get ready for some action. One of them caught my ship taking photographs of the last object, this turned out to be a highly classified military base and the patrol wasn’t happy.

I high-tailed it out of there and it was well worth the rewards.

You can also do escort missions and side-missions for the cluster that you’re in, some of the side missions are ways to gain access to keys (you need these to jump through hyperspace to other clusters and places) that lead to hidden systems, usually infested with pirates and scum that must be wiped out, the reward is often an artefact (we shall talk about those in a short while).

That’s the core gameplay mechanic of Darkstar One in a nutshell, it’s something that has been done before but it’s done fairly well here and it’s a lot of fun. Following the story is just as fun but you really need to explore the systems and clusters to get the artefacts that are hidden all over the place.

Space combat plays an integral part in the game and it’s fairly fast, furious and can be particularly deadly, you might need to restart several times before you get the hang of using the Darkstar One to battle multiple opponents. Combat is also fun and that is what matters the most in a game like this, the rewards for nixing pirates are a boost to your rep (the game tracks how you react to others in the universe) and a supply of credits.

So if the combat is fun and the game is fun, where’s the catch, well I found that I didn’t like the cargo system at all. You tow the container behind your ship and that makes the ship sluggish and so on. You also need to drop your container to fight effectively since most pirates can catch up to you without any problems; again, this wasn’t at all fun for me.

I would have thought that fitting a cargo hold into the Darkstar One was a good idea, but if you like towing containers and so forth then you’ll probably think I’m smoking Regellian Pipeweed for this part of the review. I must also warn fellow players that until the pirates are recognised as hostiles – you shouldn’t drop your cargo if you intend to keep it; otherwise the game will think you surrendered it and take the cargo from you.

You can also target a friendly vessel and choose to assist them via the Y key, this will allow you to target the ship they’re currently targeting – which is very useful if you’re protecting a cargo or cruiser ship on a mission or you just decide to lend a helping hand to a fellow space traveller.

The game has numerous alien races and at least 200 weapons and pieces of equipment to mount on and in the Darkstar One, there are special missions that take place inside planets and on the surface as well as a few other surprises that I won’t mention, it’s a big game and you’re going to spend a lot of time exploring the vast map in search of all the artefacts you can muster.