Thankfully, the space-combat which forms most of the game is actually pretty fun. If I’d wanted to grind for hours on end I wouldn’t have cancelled my World of Warcraft account. The result is a feeling of grinding from start to finish, where you’re doing a quest not because you want to, but because you’re trying to make your ship powerful enough to survive subsequent areas – where you’ll be doing similar activities to what you’ve already been doing for hours. You spend the entirety of the game either: shooting down other ships, transporting cargo from one area to another (*yawn*) or simply flying off to far-away places in order to meet someone.
#DARKSTAR ONE GAMEPLAY UPGRADE#
Whether you’re completing story missions or grinding side quests for cash to upgrade your ship, the entirety of Broken Alliance boils down to one of three goals. After all, most media essentially retells the same few story archetypes over and over but it’s the journey to the conclusion that lets the game down.īroken Alliance’s graphics are pleasing to the eye, but later areas just seem to be re-skinned versions of earlier zones. Using the DarkStar, Kayron sets out to kill the man he believes killed his father although the ending will only be a surprise to those of you who haven’t watched Star Wars Episode VI. The ship can absorb ancient artifacts from space and uses them to alter the abilities and look of the ship.
#DARKSTAR ONE GAMEPLAY FULL#
Sadly though the new visuals and name change can’t bring DarkStar One: Broken Alliance up to speed, and the revamp cannot disguise a campaign full of clichés which could have been shortened to enhance any feeling of fun.īroken Alliance follows a young pilot named Kayron, who’s father left him a ship called DarkStar One. Four years later in 2010 and the game has been re-released on Xbox 360, with Hi-Def graphics and a fancy new name. Either way, it’s far more engaging than listening to the pilots outside complaining about why the landing queue is so long.DarkStar One was an enjoyable but repetitive game that launched in 2006 on PC. You will be grazing through the mission bulletins, or the trade lists, when a voiceover will broadcast the arrival of a large freighter (loading and unloading goods in real-time), or newscast reasons for the recent shortage in energy cells, or even give a heads up whether pirates have entered the system (if you’re trading, you might want to wait out the intrusion if you’re ‘rat hunting, you could scramble your own fighter and snag some bounties). The public announcement system inside of space stations works like a champ, though. The cut scenes’ acting registers well, but some of the in-game voice actors - especially the lady doing air traffic control for the Terran trade stations - are struggling with with their script reading. And some of the voice acting needs to hook itself up to a heart monitor to see if there’s any life left in it. The trashy, beach-read storyline - while a noble effort - is anything but a page-turner, and often smacks of summer writing workshops. Instead, it’s platter after platter of a five-item menu. And on that same token, 30 systems would’ve felt much more fully-realized and wholesome you could’ve gone home satisfied. This game could’ve expanded to 3,000 systems and accomplished nothing more than its initial public offering. Exploring over 300 systems looks good on paper, but the nominal variety between them all turns the universe into a bland soup of tired expectations. And those fun-sounding conventions wear down quickly. Aside from a few fun conventions introduced early on, there’s rarely any sense of awe or discovery at what you come across.
The final frontier has been burned, pillaged, and rebuilt overtop of itself so many times that it’s all instantly familiar. Sci-fi themes can easily (and often do) fall in love with their own bloated sense of “imagination,” while ironically relying on stereotypes manufactured on a sci-fi assembly line.
#DARKSTAR ONE GAMEPLAY SIMULATOR#
A handshake affirming the expected gameplay niceties of a space simulator (trading, technology trees, and joystick-lovin’ space combat) but perhaps squeezing a little too hard on the keep-it-simple principles. But the promise of this becoming the next Freelancer is gripped in a handshake from developers Ascaron. There’s relatively little space out there in outer space, which only serves to shrink any grasp at the immensity of the DarkStar galaxy. Solemn trumpet fanfare streams into the DarkStar One universe a universe brightly colored and lavishly detailed - saturated, in fact - with solar systems crowded with reams of inhabited planets, floating landfills of debris, and asteroids, asteroids, asteroids.
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