During my formative years as a gamer, I would gobble up any game
I could get my hands on, good or bad. I
spent untold hours exploring dozens of virtual worlds, but as the gaming
industry evolves, some genres become less common. A great example is the flight simulator; I
loved the X-Wing series of games, but
I haven’t seen a really good flight sim in well over a decade. I jumped on DarkStar One: Broken Alliance for
just this reason, but it sadly doesn’t break that trend.
DarkStar One puts you in the Kayron’s jumpsuit and follows
the eager young pilot’s first excursion.
Driven by the discovery of unusual circumstances surrounding his
father’s death, Kayron’s quest to find a saboteur takes him across the galaxy
and, as tends to happen in RPGs, draws him into every conflict he encounters.
The melding of flight sim and RPG elements is pretty cool. Instead of progressing linearly through a
series of missions, you’re able to explore different systems and sectors at
your leisure, with the main quest making up only a small portion of the
available content. You also get
RPG-esque upgrades for your ship, making leveling up an integral part of the
gameplay.
But that’s basically where the coolness ends; everything
else is disappointing. Let’s start at
the bottom and work our way up.
The control scheme is terrible. It’s pretty clear that this title is a
console port of a PC game, as the complex controls you might expect while
piloting a spaceship are severely limited by the relative lack of buttons on a
console controller. For thurst, you have
three options: forward, backward, and stopped.
Those three options alone wouldn’t be problematic, except that you also
have the option of matching the speed of your target, opening a ton of other
velocities. Your control over your speed
is limited in a fairly silly way.
Combat is also annoying because you can’t do a whole lot. Standard flying maneuvers like barrel rolls
are extremely awkward if they’re even available, so I found battles would
reduce to stopping so I could more easily target the highly evasive fighters I
encountered. There are a few fights involving larger capital ships, but those
are also heavily fighter-centric. Every
battle ends up playing out the same way, which gets incredibly repetitive.
One saving grace is the element of exploration. There are over 300 systems to explore across
several alien factions, so DarkStar One offers a large galaxy for you to
discover. Unfortunately, there’s
absolutely no incentive to venture too far off the path – each system consists
of a trading station, some neutral trade ships, and possibly an asteroid field
and research station (which won’t interact with you at all), and lonely empty
space. That’s it. Aside from admittedly beautiful planets
floating in the distance, there’s nothing to see or do in the majority of these
systems.
To make matters worse, pirates will ambush you a lot, and you can’t do much of anything
(like docking with trade stations of hyperjumping to a new system) until you
kill them. Bouncing from system to
system becomes a tedious exercise in killing a handful of pirates and visiting
the trade station before moving on to the next one, and there are very few
rewards for doing so. It feels like a
pointlessly big galaxy, with lots to explore but nothing to discover.
Quests are rather repetitive, too. Despite having a number of different
objectives, nearly all of them reduce to “go here, kill this, come back.” Main storyline quests are a little bit
better, as a few will send you to the surface of a planet for a somewhat
different experience, but those missions have a different problem – a couple of
those missions lead to disorienting and borderline nauseating areas, so they
lose whatever benefits the diversity provided.
And there are no compelling reasons to complete those
storyline missions. The narrative is
incredibly boring; I felt no real desire to see it through after a couple hours
of play. Perhaps more damning is the fact
that it hints at intriguing complexities by mentioning bitter wars and
political conflicts between races, but it never develops the history of this
galaxy. You’re left with an “everybody
hates everybody” scenario with no justification, making for a very shallow
experience.
Despite the dated animations, the presentation is decent. For most of the game, you’re dealing with distant
ships and planetary backgrounds, the lack of small details in which is pretty
hard to screw up. The cinematics are clearly
using less-than-modern graphical capabilities, but they’re still solid. Voice acting is a little awkward, but it’s
also not horrible. The fact that the
rather mediocre presentation is overall the best part of the game says
something rather disappointing about the game as a whole.
To be fair, I enjoyed the first couple hours of jumping from
system to system, recklessly dispatching pirates. It wasn’t until the lack of depth became
apparent that I started to get frustrated with it, and then the game continued
for another 10+ hours. Completing this
game is far more a test of stamina than an entertaining romp through a sci-fi universe.
DarkStar One: Broken Alliance
starts relatively well but rapidly fizzles.
It becomes incredibly tedious and generally uninteresting, leading me to
find it hard to recommend it to much of anyone.
If you’re desperate for a flight sim, it’ll help satiate that need, but your time and money are still probably better spent elsewhere.
My Rating: 2/10 – terrible.
