Darkstar One

This game is a really nice space sim at first, although the storytelling is... lacking. Severely. As in Wattpad level lacking. However, the gameplay mechanics are kinda fun, until it gets extremely repetitive. Moreover, you don't get a feeling that you get more powerful as you upgrade, as the enemies you face also get more powerful, so regardless of what you install on your ship, the combat will always be the same. And there are the crashes. I doubt you can complete this game on a modern PC, unless you're extremely lucky. Otherwise, at some point, you will just see a white screen when crossing into a new system and that's it. Game over. Even a fresh reinstall doesn't fix the issue.

After Freelancer released back in 2003, similar games were very rare to come by. Darkstar One from 2006 aimed to fill that void, but very much fell short. The main issue with the game is how repetitive it is. Even though there are more than 300 star systems to visit, their layout is almost entirely identical: a trade station, an asteroid, a planet, and a warp gate. The colors may change and there may be a research station sprinkled in, but ultimately, if you've seen the first system, you've also seen all the others. The gameplay loop is just as monotonous. Regardless of whether you're doing story or side missions, you'll be shooting enemy ships 99% of the time. While the dogfights are quite entertaining, the issue is that they don't change at all throughout the course of the game. You only get to fly a single ship, the namesake Darkstar One, whose unique trait is its ability to transform through upgrades. These upgrades are given by picking up artifacts, which are gained either by flying into an asteroid (which all look exactly the same) or liberating a system (more shooting bad guys). In addition, you can buy new weapons or ship systems, but since these are restricted by your ship level, ship customization boils down to simply purchasing the best gear currently available, without any thought required whatsoever. The weapons are samey, the enemies are samey, everything is samey. Now, this would be tolerable if the story were good enough to keep one hooked, but that isn't the case. Between poorly voice acted cutscenes and a boring and predictable plot, mustering the motivation to take out yet another squadron of bad guys for some fish looking dude with a ridiculous speech pattern took some actual willpower. The only sort of diversion was provided by Descent-like tunnel levels sprinkled in, though these were more annoying than fun, too. In short, only get this if you're suffering from insomnia.

At long last, a decent game for the Freelancer fan! After having played Freelancer I thought I would never come across another game like it. Then I played the X series and found myself hooked. On a lark I started playing Darkstar One; I was quite pleased to find an engaging, pleasant and fun game. In this game there are are 4 player categories: Pirate, Killer, Mercenary and Merchant. The Darkstar One is a ship which requires artifacts in order to upgrade. Each artifact provides extra slots for equipment or weapon mounts. The player is tasked with collecting these artifacts in the various sectors of the universe. Along with the artifacts one can perform various missions which reward credits. One uses these credits to buy equipment and weapons in order to improve the Darkstar One. There are some nifty features, too, One can speed up time in order to travel more quickly from point A to point B, as long as there are no bad guys lurking around. There are a few downsides. The voice acting is sub par. Soon after beginning the game you acquire a female companion. Her lines are so limited and repeated so often that half of the time I wanted to maroon her on a space station. The other characters are equally irritating. The taunts from hostiles are silly; unfortunately there is no way to deactivate them. That the game soon becomes predictable. Pirate attacks are all pretty much the same and one does end up grinding in order to earn the credits to buy upgrades for the ship. Of course, the graphics are not as dazzling as the more current space combat games. I don't consider these flaws to be fatal. I loved the X series -each of the games was amazing as much as it was complex. Darkstar One isn't in that arena. The learning curve is not steep and you can get the hang of it very fast. After that I found the game to be a lot of fun avoiding the problem of challenging to the point of frustration. All in all this is a game that is well worth the price if you enjoy this genre. IMHO there are few too few of these games for those who love to play them,

The game itself is actually pretty decent. Fights are entertaining, if repetitive, and the storyline is enjoyable. If I were rating it based solely on those things, I'd give it four stars. Sadly, many folks will never get to see the end of the story. Because the game suffers from so many showstopper bugs...it just stops working on some machines, for unknown reasons, and nothing can be done to get it working again (not even re-installing a clean copy). Other times you hit a spot where just opening the nav map will CTD. It's almost like they wrote the bloody thing with self-modifying code, so that any problem at all makes it unrecoverable. I played it several years ago, and enjoyed it. Been trying to play it again on two different machines (the first one decided to stop working about 20% of the way through), only to keep running into issue after issue. Unless the game you actually want to play is, "How do I keep this running", I can't recommend this one.

Ok let's get to the point here. Play the story and uninstal the game because unlike games like the X series the entire universe is static and... well sadly boring. It still has some good ideas behind it tho! The ship. While initially a bummer you can upgrade it via artifacts. And you can't upgrade every component to its maximum in one playthough (there are only enough artifacts to max out 2 stats assuming you don't touch the third at all) and those upgrades affect how your ship looks. For example if you put all your points into hull and engines your fighter will pretty much turn into a corellian corvette bristling with automatic turrets. Trading/Mining. Another idea done half right but ultimately becomes boring and tedious. You see since you play as a fighter rather than hauling things in your miniscule cargo hold you have a series of freight drones that attach to cargo containers and follow you around allowing you to trade even in a fighter. Having containers following you slows your ship down but you can just leave them when attacked deal with the pirates and simply reattach them back to your space choo choo and haul on. Mining works in a similar fashion. Fly up to some asteroid and fire at it till it breaks. it might have a nugget of ore inside. Once you find one (or more) just launch a freight drone at it and done. Combat Starts out hard but in my case things started to get trivial once i upgraded my hull. The automatic turrets do their job admirably and with 5 of them i could just ignore the pirates when hauling cargo and they would die before i reach the station anyway with minimal hull damage at worst. Things are likely harder if you turn your craft into a speedster rather than a battleship. Universe The games weakest point. It's boring and streamlined to the point of nausea. You have 5 races all wearing their hats with pride and portions of the universe are locked untill you do a story mission. Additionally "higher level" sectors contain better weapons.