Posted on: June 10, 2011

cybersleuth58

Games: 114 Reviews: 3

Space Trader/Combat and Adventure

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,

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Posted on: November 23, 2014

Stormsinger

Verified owner

Games: 259 Reviews: 1

Great for bug hunts, unplayable still

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.

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Posted on: June 5, 2015

Sonlirain

Games: 265 Reviews: 17

Good for one playthrough horrid sandbox.

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.

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Posted on: June 21, 2015

NovusBogus

Games: 319 Reviews: 6

Boring and flat

DarkStar One puts the player in the boots of a spacefaring rascal who's been gifted a unique upgradeable alien-tech craft by his genius father, and must uncover a grand conspiracy involving the galactic power elite, captains of industry, and of course aliens. At the risk of dropping spoilers, the whole thing is very 'Iron Man' though that isn't a bad thing. The plot, such that it is, is pretty decent though it clings too closely to played-out plot devices. There's an obligatory trench scene, and the twists are about as sudden and unexpected as an approaching dreadnought. One fun feature I wish more games would implement is the ability to respond to hostile radio chatter with some smacktalk of your own. It's very gratifying. Unfortunately, the gameplay is a disaster. Each system is basically one copypasta'd station, and occasionally one asteroid which contains one alien MacGuffin for your one alien MacGuffinmobile. The organic ship upgrades are actually a very neat idea, but they're permanent, finite, and there's no reset button so if you mix fighter-path and corvette-path upgrades too much you can easily wind up stuck with a ship that isn't very good. Weapons and combat get the job done, but they're very workmanlike and forgettable. Trade is nonexistent, and missions are extremely repetitive. Like Ye Olde Battlecruiser Of Internet Infamy, all the elements of a good game are present but none of them were fleshed out enough to make a compelling product. The plot is decent if you're into space opera, and some of the stuff they tried may justify a playthrough. But you won't find yourself spending any time here when you're through with the campaign, and frankly I can't recommend this game in the face of other, much better, space sims both before and after.

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Posted on: December 17, 2008

clpo13

Games: 224 Reviews: 2

Excellent space sim

I picked this up at a Target not long ago and I was pleasantly surprised. I'd never heard of the game before, but I checked out a GameSpot review, which compared it favorably to games like Freelancer. I loved Freelancer, so I bought Darkstar One immediately. I am very glad I did. It's different than most space sims in that you don't change ships. You're flying the same ship through the entire game, although you can upgrade it. How you upgrade your ship determines how it flies and fights, which makes the game seem almost RPG-ish. My main complaint is that the side missions get very repetitive, as can be expected. Escort this guy, shoot this guy, gather this material, etc. However, the storyline is very engrossing. It takes you throughout every region of the game's universe, slowly introducing you to the different races and giving you interesting missions. I haven't yet played to the end, so I have no comments on how the story ends, though I suppose it'd be bad form to reveal too much in a review. Graphically, the game is very good looking. I'd recommend a pretty decent machine if you want to crank the settings up all the way. I haven't run into any technical issues, but keep in mind that I'm not working with GOG's version. Another minor complaint is the voice acting. It's decent, but a bit amateurish at times, especially with some of the alien races. But I've certainly heard worse voice acting, so it's not too distracting in this case. Overall, this is an excellent game for people who enjoy space sims. I'd recommend it to anyone, really.

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