Although DarkStar One has it's share of problems, it will still take the cigar for fans of Freelancer, or Privateer.
The game starts off as you play a young pilot name Kayron, whose father was recently involved in a shady death, and Kayron eventually sways to avenge his father's murderer. He accomidates a ship called the DarkStar One, which is a highly sophisticated ship. Honestly, the basic plotline isn't very original, and the cutscenes were a pain to watch occaisionally, because the cinematical graphics were poor, at best, and they were very fast and poorly voice acted. Not so bad that it ruins the game, however.
Although the cinematics are poorly made, once you jump into the DarkStar One, you can go into the options menu and fly with a joystick or mouse, which leaves it ultimately up to the preference of the player. Freelancer only used the mouse, and Privateer only used the joystick, but DarkStar One lets you choose. If you lack a joystick, I would suggest using the mouse, because good joysticks are very hard to find these days.
Outer space in this game is very well-detailed and the models for the ships, stations, asteroids, and planets are simply amazing. Inside the DarkStar One, it is very impressive as well.
The gameplay is addictive, but does get repetitive. A lot of the missions are the same, with the same motive and ending, but that's why there's multiple types of missions. You can either do the basic bounty hunt, or listen in on a secret meeting and spy for a certain trading company or government agents.
The economy system is very interesting, and each system is unique. Sometimes, a disease can outbreak in a system, and the price of medicine could skyrocket, which you could capitalize on. Some systems are poor, some are rich, and each is owned by a different faction. You have the Galactic Democracies, Federations, Dictatorships, and Anarchists, to name a few. Each system will have certain commodities considered contraband, amount of police in the area, and quite a few other factors.
The DarkStar One is an upgradable ship, and you upgrade it by flying around in asteroids and collecting enough artifacts to upgrade your ship. You will eventaully need more and more artifacts to upgrade, and if you're feeling a little lazy, you can just fly to the Trade Station and pay someone to get it for you.
There are a wide assortment of gadgets, gizmos, and guns that serve many different purposes from the life-saving the mundane. Each weapon and item is unique in it's own way, and it makes it very fun to mix and match with weapons, to find the correct loadout to suit your ship.
One thing that I enjoyed very much was the ability to change the difficulty setting in the options menu. You can have it on very easy, or give yourself a big challenge. You don't need to be the greatest pilot to play the game - you can set the difficulty right to where you need it.
Although, DarkStar One has it's own share of glitches, errors, and gameplay issues. The frame per second rate can get unstable, and even cause the game to crash on rare occaisions. The game has a $40 USD pricetag, so it does come with a few errors that will cause the game to unexpectantly crash. However, these errors can be fixed by further updates, and the folks at Ascaron already have fixed some with the update.
Overall, it's a good game for space sim fans, and savor it while you can, because although there are hundreds of game studios, we rarely see a space sim, and definetely not one that's a good as DarkStar One.
This game looks good, sounds good, and plays good, if you'll pardon my English. If you're a fan of space sims, or even if you're new to the flight sim genre, this game should definetely be in your library.