Darkstar One - PC DVD ROM

A lot of reviewers have raved about how great Darkstar One is, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to break ranks on this one. It’s not terrible, but it’s far from memorable. A few years back I had picked up a copy of Freelancer, and for a while that was great fun for a “space-sim”, especially with a lively online community (which has now declined), so when I saw “Darkstar One” on the shelf of a gaming store in town I was curious, but the whopping £30 price tag put me off. I scuttled onto Play’s website, and there it was on sale for half that amount, and now that I’ve played and completed the game I am very relieved not to have spent £30 on it.

The storyline? Well you play Kayron Jarvis, noob pilot, who is given a brand new “living” ship (the “Darkstar One”), on a mission to find out the identity of his fathers murderer (which is blatantly obvious within the first few minutes of the game). I say “living” because instead of just buying lots of new toys for your space craft, you collect crystals that are “hidden” (again blatantly obvious to find) in asteroids, and your ship “evolves” (rather like using experience points in an RPG).

The gameplay is very easy, with no steep learning curves either in trading or running battles, and it does make for an instant action game. The trading works like this, if the trade station sell it, it will be cheap, if they don’t it’ll be expensive so whatever you’ve got in your cargo hold, offload it. As for ridding the universe of pirates, point, shoot..boom. Couldn’t be simpler.

There’s also the use of “Time Acceleration” much in the style of the “X” series, which does help to make the game very instant, and your ship is capable of making a hyperspace jump from anywhere once you’ve set a destination point in reach (avoiding the hugely irritating grind that dogged “Freelancer”).

Some of the graphics are very nice indeed to look at, but there is a problem in that the same “space scape scenes” get used over and over again, and then to compound the problem, there are some space ship graphics that quite frankly look very amateurish (and like the scenery, are used over and over again too). The targeting “Heads Up Display” also looks very rushed, and in my own personal opinion looks hideous.

The universe is populated on a rather uninspired map by Terran’s, Octo, Martok, Raptor’s, Arak and the Thul, and whereas these might sound mighty interesting or diverse…they aren’t. In fact, it’s very much a map of “stupid names r us”.

Then there’s the rather awful voice acting. Admittedly there aren’t many games with good voicing work done on them, but seriously sub-standard work like this is a major failing. For example, whenever you visit a pirate system that you have to “liberate”, you are always met with an alien who either sounds Welsh or Irish. Now don’t get me wrong, I quite like those accents, it’s just stretching credibility a little too far when you see an Ant like creature trying to threaten you with it.

Essentially what Darkstar One has done is taken some very good elements from X2: The Threat, and Freelancer, and then contrived to make what should have been an excellent game into a rather average monotonous one. This, personally speaking, could herald the end of the space sim genre, and if you were pressed to choose a game in this category I would probably say save your money and pick up Freelancer for a lot less cash as it’s now available on a budget title.

Below is a video of Darkstar One.