It's a well documented fact that every child has, at
some point, wanted to be an astronaut. I still remember standing up in my
French lesson back at school, and proudly declaring "Je voudrais etre
Cosmonaut!" (I would like to be an astronaut).
Nine years on, and little has changed. Well, I'm
slightly taller and my voice is a bit deeper, but that desire to explore the
furthest reaches of space is still there, and it's with the spirit of
exploration in mind that I sat down to play Darkstar One, an outer space
flight-sim/Role Playing hybrid.
You take the role of the suitably space age sounding
Kayron Jarvis, who inherits the Darkstar One (the titular space ship, and an
incredibly advanced piece of technology) from your deceased father, who was
killed while out on an escort.
Now, the Darkstar One is no ordinary spaceship, as it has
the ability to absorb alien "artifacts" (glowing green rocks mostly
found inside large asteroids) and, basically, evolve. Each artifact allows you
to upgrade a certain aspect of your ship, be it the wings, hull, engines, or
the ship's Plasma Cannon, and your ship reflects these upgrades both visually
and physically, sometimes unlocking new upgrades/equipment (upgrading your
wings to make them longer allows you to equip more weapons, for example) as you go. This
adds the a degree of personalisation to the game, as the way you begin to customize your craft
will vary from player to player. Want to fly in all guns blazing? Use your
artifacts to upgrade your cannon and hull armour. Fancy a more nimble, stealthy
approach? Upgrade your engines and wings, for increased maneuverability.
See that big asteroid? Chances are there's an artifact somewhere inside it.
Because you can upgrade one of the three areas of the
ship when you find enough artifacts, it's easy to upgrade the wrong part, and
find yourself rather out of your depth a few missions later. When I picked up
the first artifact, for example, my tutorial advisor told me I should use it on
the Darkstar One’s wings, to enable me to equip more weapons. I ignored this
advice, and upgraded my ships hull. A few missions later, I had to take down
some pirates before they destroyed a transport vessel, and while my ship
laughed off any shots from the pirates, it was impossible to take the pirates
out before the transport decided it had had enough, and promptly exploded.
Luckily, what could have been a game-breaking mistake was easily rectified with
a bit of time spent exploring. On the Galaxy map (where you set your next hyperspace jump location), Clusters which contain
artifacts have a green icon next to them, so it's relatively quick and easy to
find an artifact and level-up your ship if you ever find yourself
underpowered.
The first few missions see you learning the ropes with
the new craft, teaching you the basic controls, how to fly the ship, and the
basics of interstellar dogfighting. The controls are pretty easy to get to
grips with, with the left stick used to point your ship at where you want to
fly/shoot, and the speed controls/roll on the right stick. The only real
problem we’ve encountered with the controls is that there’s no way of inverting
your roll direction, so you’ll often find your ship rotating the opposite way
to how you wanted it to roll, if you're strange and insist on having inverted controls, like me.
Once you've got the hang of the Darkstar One, a friend
of your late fathers reveals that all is not as it seems with the events
surrounding his death - and so Kayron takes the Darkstar One and sets out to find
the man who killed his father.
Luckily there's some variation in how the different clusters look, otherwise it'd get a bit boring as you leap from place to place.
From here on in, you're at liberty to explore the
universe how you feel (well, sort of). Unfortunately you can't zip from one end
of existence to the other in an instant, as A) Your ship doesn't have a
powerful enough jump drive, and B) You don't have access to all the “warp gates”
(hyperspace junctions that enable you to leap from one cluster to another in a
matter of seconds). In order to unlock the warp gates, you need the key to each
gate, which are gained as you progress through the story missions, opening up
more and more of the universe as you gain more information on your father's
murder and upgrade your ship sufficiently.
Because space itself is quite an inhospitable
environment, and because you'll be visiting a few of the more seedy areas of
the Galaxy, you'll quite often encounter various roughnecks as you make your
way from point A to point B. Too many times you emerge from hyperspace (in a
galaxy you're only visiting because your ship isn't powerful enough to make it
to the target galaxy in a single jump) to be met with a gang of pirates, and
you're in their way. If you're lucky, they'll be far enough away that your warp
drive will have recharged before they get close, allowing you to use it again
quickly to get away, but if they get too close, there's no choice but to fight
them. The first few times this happens it's quite an adrenaline rush, as you
outmaneuver the pirates and abolish them all in minutes, but when it happens
two or three times in a single journey from one space station to the galaxy
where a mission takes place, it's more than a little irritating, and makes them
seem a lot less random than they should be.
You'll be seeing a lot of this on your travels.
There’s a lot of little touches in Darkstar One that
help to make it feel like the universe is a living, breathing thing. On
approach to the Trade Station, you’ll sometimes get scanned by a Police craft
(to make sure you’re not trying to smuggle anything into the Station), then
once he’s ok-ed your ship, you need to open a communication channel with the
Station itself to request docking permission. It all serves to make it feel
like you’re a tiny part of this gigantic universe. There are even occasions
when you drop out of hyperspace to find a group of rebels trying to take out a
large pirate cruiser, and you can join the fight (on whoever’s side you really
want to) if you feel like it, or just carry on to wherever you were initially
heading. By far our favourite of these little touches though, is the fact that
you can open up a communication channel with the ships you’re engaged in combat
with, and trash talk them. Every one of our battles now is more of a war of
words than of weapons, with the airwaves full of cries of “I’ve got you now!”, “This
is Darkstar One, prepare to die!” and our favourite “God is Merciful, but I am
not”.
Follow the landing lights to dock at the station. But don't take too long, or they'll close the door on you. Luckily your ship seems quite strong, so you'll just bounce off.
If you ever get bored of doing the story missions (and
shouting at your enemies), there’s an impressive amount of other things for you
to try your hand at. At each “Trade Station” (which you’ll find at the centre
of every “cluster”) you can take on a range of side quests ranging from simple
package deliveries to bounty hunting missions, which will earn you money and
increase your reputation throughout the galaxy. As well as the side quests, you
can also talk to Cargo ships surrounding the Trade Station and offer them your
services as an escort, protecting them from pirates as they journey from place
to place. You can even become a Trader (or a smuggler) by importing things from
Trade Station to Trade Station.
Darkstar One is a fine example of the Space-Simulator,
a sadly neglected genre these days. And while it’s pretty obvious it’s based on
a PC game (the menu’s, for example, are archaic), it’s easy enough to get into
for the rest of us. It’s also big enough to keep us occupied until the next
space-simulator comes out, whenever that may be.
I could probably get the
qualifications to be a real astronaut in that time… Unless you all buy this, and persuade them to make a sequel.
