Explore the universe and blow stuff up if you can stand the staleness.

User Rating: 7.4 | DarkStar One PC
By Neverness | Review Date:
When I first starting playing DarkStar One, I had mixed feelings. It ran very smoothly (which is always a plus) and was fun but it was missing too many key elements to make it a really lasting and truly fun game. DarkStar One pits you as the rather generic Kayron who pilots the titular ship. The game does a good job of introducing you to the controls as the first few missions are tutorial and also does some story exposition. However, the game's controls are extremely simple, less so than the early Wing Commander games it seemed to me, but the mouse/keyboard dynamic is very intuitive and works well. The game treats you to several movies in the beginning and there is somewhat just "wrong" with how they look. There is a strange haze in virtually all of them, like the animators couldn't get the lighting right and eventually said screw it, which I found distracting. The characters look detailed and the movies do display some artistic flair, but still I kept feeling like something was missing. The only vague comparison I can think of is how a TV soap opera looks very different than a movie. That is the feeling I got watching the movies. If that makes any sense.

The missions are interesting but not groundbreaking. Generally, they involve blowing other ships up. There are a rare few missions that actually have you going down to a planet and flying in the atmosphere and the like, but you get precious few of these to do. A couple turret-based blasting missions are also present. Overall, it is what you would expect from a space shooter.

You do get to upgrade the ship as you find artifacts and the ship does visually change as this happens, which is a nice touch, and you gradually get new weapons and systems but it isn't as exciting as the gamebox made it out to be. I wanted more customization.

The weakest point in the game is definitely the sound. Your shots hit enemy ships with a very unsatisfying and tinny ping. Compare this to the thunderous sound effects from Nexus: The Jupiter Incident and DarkStar One pales. Voice acting is adequate in most parts to silly in several. There are many points where a single voice, initially voiced by a human, is given to the aliens and it just looks absurd for insectoid or reptellian bounty hunters and space station administrators to all have the exact same voice as a human. The lizard aliens hiss all of their s's and this gets extremely annoying and many times you cannot skip the dialogue. Bottom line, I like the game, but I can only stand it for a few sessions before I have to put it down for a few weeks then come back. A passable game, but it needs much more polish to be a good game.

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