But for sheer shoot 'em up fun in outer space, enhanced with enough peripheral activities to make things interesting, there isn't much out there today like it.
Ignore the poor FMV and bad characterization, instead concentrate on the fantastic elite style gameplay and shoot the heck out of stuff. Like space games but find the X universe a little too daunting? Get this!
It is DarkStar One's repetitiveness that decimates its chances with anyone other than space-sim buffs. While it's addicting, the gameplay just isn't varied enough to fulfill the game's potential greatness, nor keep you engaged for the game's lengthy storyline.
With a bit more beefed up graphics and a major fix on the controls it would have been a must buy, still, there is an awful lot of fun to be had playing Darkstar One.
Constricted. It isn’t so much that Darkstar One is a bad game, it’s just that the developers failed to optimise on good ideas - it seems as though they took the easy way out rather than expand on them.
Though not the game "Freelancer" fans have been waiting for, space-adventurers will still find plenty of targets to blow up here. And we'll take what we can get. [Oct. 2006, p.105]
Essentially it's the same five minutes of entertainment repeated over and over again and it quickly becomes wearing and repetitious. [Sept 2006, p.118]
I first played this game when was first released and enjoyed it immensely ive played it threw close to 20 times over years it has some simplistic aspects that could of been fleshed out more but i suppose they had to work with what they could and stay in budget. one thing i found is you cant just collect parts and level up to get unfair advantage as there two parts for sure if lvl up ship too fast makes em impossible
Yet again i wanted to give this game a 6.5. But rounded - 7 it is :)
In any case - this is a space flight sim with a rather nice implementation of the ship's upgrade which is based on player experience. However, mission do tend to become similar very fast. Controls are a little weird but i got used to them. However - it's weird that while you can strafe left and right you cannot strafe upward or down (descend and ascend). Weird.
Xpansion is a much more deeply involving experience, even if you do not choose to pursue the main plot. Dark Star is basically Expansion Lite (very lite!) :)
Customizing your ship with weapons and special abilities is the best part about this game. While space battles are well done, fun, and with good physics, it does get boring somewhat quickly. The main missions and side quests can be interesting as it progresses through the storyline, but it does not give you a feeling of great accomplishment as you go through them. The trading aspect of the game can and might as well be ignored completely. It provides you with minimal profits in comparison to the other means to acquire credits. Speaking of credits, I completed the game with 8.5 million credits in my possession. After a while, the amount of credits you accumulate will become obsolete, as you will have more than enough to get whatever you want. The game suffers from extreme repetitiveness, which also creates tedium and dullness when you do the same two or three activities over, and over, and over, and over. Simply put, the game is about 20 hours too long. The developers should have been more concise and implemented more diverse aspects in more ways than just this. The end game is surprisingly bland and unexciting. Also, throughout the game, you are given a false sense of freewill. Your progress is almost completely linear. It took me about 31 hours to complete.
I did not experience any bugs like other viewers, but found this game to be a bore rather quickly. If you have played Freelancer, this game is that, except with 90% of it cut out. You only ever fly one ship and the upgrades you get dont make the player feel all that special, adding a fin here and there, maybe removing a fin sometimes, nothing compared to the thrill of building up savings and buying newer bigger ships or deciding to fly a freighter or a fighter or any of the other awesome things just about any respectable game of this genre boasts. Upgrades will eventually make you wince, because now you have to grind for money to pay for the same equipment you start with, just with higher numbers attached, so after flying through five to ten of the same winding tunnel on the same asteroid shape over and over and over in every star cluster, you will then fly to the same exact station a couple hundred times to do the same exact missions a couple hundred times as well. The systems are all the same, except some have a magenta or red hue instead of a blue hue, and some have names that sound like Blah Blah instead of Bling Zang. The voice acting is so bad that it surpasses painful, about halfway through the game I couldn't take it anymore, and muted the sound anytime anyone spoke in a situation where I could not skip it (in many cases you will fail a mission if you warp before someone has finished speaking, and most other cases you can't do anything and just have to listen). The voice acting wasn't helped by the various races that speak as slowly as they possibly can, making you turn your face from the screen in agony while half-hoping you will collide with an asteroid (which will fail to kill you as colission damage is almost nonexistent in this game) If you want to play a cool game that is a lot like this but better in every fathomable way, play Freelancer. The indoor/planetary missions in Darkstar One were something of a refreshement from the rest of the banal, repetetive gameplay, but even those don't compare to much older and cooler games like Descent. I found everything about Darkstar One to be minimal in the extreme.
Darkstar One could have been a contender in the Space Sim genre but crippling bugs, some of which are complete showstoppers ruin the game. One of the worst bugs involves an infinite loading loop when travelling to different systems, this bug so far has never been fixed and no-work-arounds other than a complete full reinstall of your operating system if your one of the unlucky people to get this bug. This bug is most likely caused by some remnant of the Starforce DRM because even reinstalling the game does not fix this particular problem.
SummaryDarkStar One is an open-ended action/adventure title set in a huge universe populated by a variety of unique alien races. Players will take on the role of an intrepid young adventurer, Kayron Jarvis, as he explores space, upgrading and customizing his ship – the DarkStar One. The game's story, written by renowned German Fantasy and Scien...