Boredom is the gamer’s worst enemy, and I am particularly vulnerable to its subversive and fiendish ways. As a game reviewer, my job is to blow through games in a professional manner as quickly as possible (taking the time to examine specific fine details, of course) so I can poop out an article and move on to the next release. Unfortunately, only so many noteworthy titles come out in a month, and it’s only a matter of time before I’m left scrambling for my ancient copies of Crusader: No Remorse or Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising to fill the void. That’s how I stumbled across Starscape, by the way – boredom. I simply stumbled across this interesting little title that promised to be essentially a single-player version of the old classic “Subspace”, with some strategic and storyline elements thrown in for good measure. What I was expecting was a low-budget title that I’d get sick of after about ten minutes, but instead got a high-quality fun-filled experience that I’m usually hard-pressed to find in this age of half assed Serious Sam rehashes. Granted, Starscape has been out for some time (and one can find advertisement banners for it on just about any major site), but I figured this underrated title could use a bit of extra attention, so here’s my impressions.

First, the story. The game is set far into the future, where the human race is preparing to deploy its latest piece of technology: a space station designated “Aegis”. Onboard is a new type of experimental jump system called the “Dimensional Drive”. Since the first field test for this system has a high danger factor, the station spends a significant amount of time being relocated to a far-off sector of space under conventional drives, with a heavy escort. When the test begins however, something goes wrong with the experiment, and the station and its fleet are pulled into a dimension of space known as the “Grid Zone”. Before they know what’s happening, alien forces raid the Aegis, make off with most of its crew and technology, and leave it stranded in the middle of nowhere. As the only remaining pilot (alongside a number of senior officers), the player is tasked with rebuilding the Aegis’ systems, researching new technologies, and embarking on a quest to try and recover the lost crew members and escape the Grid Zone.

When the singleplayer campaign starts up (the player is given a choice of basic difficulty options before starting, which affect basic variables like how commonly he can save and what research options are available), the player is immediately thrust into the game in a foreign sector with a single crappy, basic attack vessel, lost and uncertain what to do. The remaining crew of the Aegis is quick to establish contact and explain the situation, and then the player is given a basic how-to on getting started with the game. After a brief introduction on flying around, gathering resources, and some other basic gameplay elements, a wave of enemy ships appear to test the player’s combat abilities. Once the enemy has been annihilate and suitable resources gathered, the player can dock with the Aegis and jump out to learn more on how the game universe works.

Basically, the game’s has two distinct play modes – the “Grid”, where time is paused (unless a move or “skip time” command is issued on the map dialogue, where the game will advance in a quasi-turn-based fashion), and the actual in-sector playfield, where everything occurs in real time. While in the Grid, the player can access the various facilities onboard the Aegis to advance in the conflict against the mysterious overwhelming alien force. The aforementioned map dialogue is probably where the player will be spending the most time, as it offers an overview of the current location of enemy forces (size of red beacons indicate how powerful a given enemy fleet is), a basic overview of available resources in specific sectors, and color-coded indicators on which sectors contain friendly forces (yes, there’s more to this game occasionally than just jumping in and blowing away everything), the enemy “mothership” for the current zone (the game has five separate zones to work through), and unknown “dangerous” sectors often filled with resources, but also hostile life forms. There are also certain “hyper” sectors, which allow players to move between zones and quickly jump from one end of the current zone to the other.

The second most popular section for me was the “Research & Development” screen. This is where the actual strategic/RPG aspect of the game comes into play, as players can use the facilities offered in this dialogue to advance their capabilities during gameplay. A maximum of one hundred points of three separate resource types can be held in the Aegis’ cargo bay, and various research and production jobs require differing quantities of investment. In order to obtain new technology (say, an upgraded shield system), the player must first spend time researching the item, then actually produce it for use on his ship. Selectable variables include number of items to produce (obviously this only applies to production, not research) and the amount of available manpower dedicated to the task. Manpower and resources can be split up, so it is possible to have research and production tasks running at the same time. If the resource bank runs dry, the process will simply be marked as “STALLED!” until the player has a chance to head out and scoop up more goodies. Cool stuff. I really like the whole strategic base this aspect offers to the game, as the implementation propels Starscape far above being a stupidly simple shoot-‘em-up.

Other facilities on the Aegis include the station’s storeroom, where players can assess how much equipment they have and junk excess components if they need a quick resource injection, as well as a screen for outfitting the Aegis itself with an assortment of tools and turreted weapons. There is also a dedicated hangar screen, where players can custom-outfit their available ship hulls with all the equipment they’ve built and gathered (engines, generators, batteries, weapons, etc). My only complaint about the hangar dialogue was that it felt really clunky and hard to work with when it really shouldn’t have been – moving and swapping components was a pain in the ass requiring me to click through several windows in sequence just to perform a simple role. A more direct drag-n-drop system would’ve worked much better in my crazy opinion.

Once the player enters a sector and kicks up the action, however, the game’s true beauty comes into play. The game uses impressively detailed 2d graphics to an impressive degree, allowing for some truly amazing special effects that I haven’t seen in a game like this in a long time. Beam and energy weapons in general just look dead sexy, and the effect of diving into a huge flotilla of enemy ships and dispensing a trio of Nova Bombs looks awesome. Obviously the game’s overall level of ship/object detail isn’t going to approach anything like that of Freespace 2 or the upcoming Nexus, but considering the game’s production values, I’d say the developers did a pretty awesome job all around.

Controlling the game is also dirt simple – surprising, given the amount of depth involved. The game operates on a semi-Newtonian model with heavy inertia, but propelling my spacecraft around was a simple matter done via the arrow keys – up accelerators, down is reverse/brake, and left and right turn in those respective directions. It is also possible to double-tap the accelerate key for a sudden burst of speed. Everything else is done with the player’s left hand via the Q, W, E, and R keys. Q and W fire weapons linked in the hangar dialogue to the first and second weapon groups respectively, while the E key engages the tractor beam (if one is equipped) for brining stray resources randomly released by destroyed asteroids or the occasional enemy component onboard the ship’s cargo hold. Finally, R is used as a kind of “Recall” command to tell the Aegis to open its docking bays to let the player in. If the Aegis is off-screen, the R key can be pushed twice to have the Aegis fly to the player’s position under its own power. Naturally each and every function can be rebound to another key, and the game has full support for secondary devices, like gamepads or joysticks.

With the great artistic style, addictive gameplay, huge multitude of tools and weapons to research and produce, and easy-to-access gameplay that will still manage to appeal to just about any gamer (even hardcore fans of sims like Freespace 2 will find a reason to enjoy this title), it’s surprising that I could find anything significant to complain about regarding this hot little title from Moonpod Games, but a couple of issues still arose that I had to take note of. First, the game is a little short. With only five separate zones to blow through before the end of the game rolls around, I found that the experience, while fun, was over all too quickly, and while the “Instant Action” and “Survival” modes offered through the main menu add a little replay value, I got tired of even these in fairly short order. I think the storyline could have been a little more fleshed out too, with some more scripted encounters and intriguing events. Even though the game’s approach is somewhat non-linear (players can move around between the different zones and sectors whenever they feel like it), each zone always seemed to progress by finding a few roaming enemy capital ships, destroying them, salvaging their data cores, and then zooming off to the newly found enemy “headquarters” sector to engage in the local “boss fight”. There were occasional detours to gather resources or go talk to the “Xenarch” (a battered friendly force fighting the evil aliens) for some new technology, but that was the extent of it. More depth to the storyline would definitely have been nice, but Starscape’s current plot is still quite acceptable. I also found the difficulty curve to be a little simplistic, as I quickly discovered that I was able to just go and hide in one of the “Dangerous” sectors (which have infinite stockpiles of resources) and research all available technology to have a ridiculous advantage when I finally set out.

Aside from that (and the lack of any kind of multiplayer support – co-op play would’ve been kinda cool here), I feel that Starscape is definitely an awesome title that is well worth the value for purchase. The game’s graphics engine is quite nicely put together, can handle resolutions of either 640x480 or 800x600 (in 16 and 32-bit color modes and windowed or fullscreen modes), and will probably run beautifully on just about any half-assed modern system even below the 1Ghz range – the minimum requirements even go down as low as a 300Mhz rig with a 3dfx card, so it’s a safe bet that this will run on anything. Seriously, anybody finding themselves terribly bored at one point will want to look this game up and give it a spin. If you’re any kind of action game fan who just wants to zoom around blowing the shit out of everything with an excellent level of detail, check out Starscape.