A newly released game in the under-appreciated space-action genre, Darkstar One can be summed up as a literal combination of Freelancer’s free-style gameplay and the quest-styled side missions seen in Tachyon: The Fringe.. UK-based developer Ascaron Entertainment has worked to put out what is effectively a free-form title with multiple upgrade paths (almost reminiscent of an RPG), interstellar trading, plenty of side missions, and an overarching plot to boot. The real question however lies on if Darkstar One offers enough to be a truly memorable asset to help boost the dying genre, or is it instead just another me-too title with a bolted on storyline and stale gameplay?

Darkstar One takes place far in the future (as most space games tend to – funny that) with a great deal of history already in place. Centuries after some kind of massive galactic war, humanity has settled into place into a centralized empire of races working towards a peaceful co-existence. You have your cliché big-muscled, honor-bound Mortok, generic fish-people (the aptly-named “Octo”) an expected race of space-insects called the “Arrack”, and a number of other reasons – but negativity aside, the developers do a fairly decent job of applying a cohesive back-story and unique style to reach ace, and it’s just a shame that most of it is only covered in detail through the documentation. Anyways, moving on: The player assumes the rule of Kayron Jarvis, a young pilot in training. During the intro of the game’s campaign, Kayron learns that his father has been killed through an act of sabotage, with his only legacy being a mysterious alien ship, the “Darkstar One”, which contains unique technology enabling it to absorb artifacts and expand its functions dynamically. Kayron graciously accepts the ship and sets off on a quest to find out who killed his father, and to unlock the secrets of the ship he’s obtained – oh, and along the way also deal with an enigmatic alien race launching unprovoked attacks on major races.

Because most of the effort has gone into the storyline and has focused the gameplay completely around the “Darkstar” ship, Darkstar One is completely singleplayer-oriented and has no multiplayer features. This makes sense as the game doesn’t quite seem well-suited to it, but I’m always a strong proponent to at least having co-op support of some kind (especially for a large-scale game like this with an alleged dynamic universe). But with that said, Darkstar One does have a good deal to offer to players. I’ve already mentioned the upgrade system to some extent, but let me go into more detail on this. ‘Hidden’ in various sectors are glowing green artifacts, which players must collect in sufficient quantities to upgrade their ship. Note that I use the term ‘hidden’ loosely – the game annoyingly issues an “ARTIFACT IS HERE” notice any time you’re in the right sector, cutting down hugely on any exploration the game might have had to offer in this respect, and you can even instantly tell which (known) systems have artifacts by checking the galactic map. But anyhow, once sufficient artifacts are collected, players will get a new option to upgrade their ship in one of three ways; the hull (to expand more armor and add turret mounts), the wings (offers more maneuverability and fixed-weapon mounts), and the engines (take a guess). This offers a pretty cool choice-dynamic to the game, as it only seems to offer enough artifacts to really take you through one path and I was eventually forced to make some hard changes on how exactly to upgrade my ship. Not to mention the whole “Plasma Thrower” system (technically the game calls it a “Cannon”, but the term doesn’t seem to fit the function of the device) which can basically be activated for a variety of temporary effects, such as an increased shield or weapon recharge, or an EMP strike against nearby enemy ships.

Players also have another path for upgrading their ships too however, and this is in the form of physical hardware upgrades. These can be as simple as better shields or afterburners, to improved control computers (which can let you lug more cargo containers around), modules to let you auto-dock with stations once you’re within a certain range, and even a sensor jammer, which has a chance of fooling police scanners any time they do an inspection on you. Some of these assets tie pretty nicely into the game’s trading element, and thankfully running cargo is actually something of an interesting experience. Stations have a simple UI so players can quickly see what kind of a deal they’ll get on buying or selling commodities at that location, and have a cargo carrying capacity based on their existing equipment. When the player launches, one or several pods may appear behind their ship, being carried by drones. Then it’s up to the player to make it safely to a target system and sell off his load. This is made tricky by the fact that the Darkstar One handles like a complete pig any time it’s tugging a cargo crate, and any time I was jumped by pirates, I was basically forced to temporarily abandon the crates to fight them off, praying somebody didn’t fly past to snatch them.

As a surprise, the game also offers somewhat interesting scripted events. Many of the little contract mission one can do on the side, for example, are complete with their own little backstory and dialogue. One such contract for example involves flying out to spy on a clandestine meeting between corporations, using a special microphone to record their conversation. Of course after hearing it the delegates inevitably notice you and launch a bunch of fighters to attack – in fact, sadly most of these missions end in a linear combat scene with no real way to avoid it. Sometimes however players also might find themselves with a random mission or sequence of events thrust upon them – such as a pilot being chased by pirates calling for help, or overhearing a conversation between a broken-down pilot asking for help and a local repair ship telling him to re-router power (though the nerd inside me was disappointed with the lack of techno-babble – the terms “warp core breach” or “flux capacitor” never seemed to come up). And yet still even these give way to repetition, and it wasn’t too long before I started seeing the same sequence played over again.

Actual combat in Darkstar is a little simplistic, but still fun to engage in. Often it’s not much more complex than just closing to firing range and opening up, but the game offers some variety thanks to the different weapons available, be they fixed-mount forward firing weapons, automatic tracking turrets, or even homing missiles, which unfortunately have something of an annoying constant noise that plays once “locked on” – there are also lateral thrust controls available to spice up combat maneuvering a little, though don’t expect anything on the level of Independence War. Actually, the controls are one of my major beefs with the game. Numerous times I kept wanting to use certain controls that seemed non-existent – for example, being able to quickly target a mission-critical ship during a dreaded escort mission and then find it’s attacker would have been very useful, but I couldn’t find a keyboard shortcut for doing this and instead had to awkwardly hold down the space bar and drag my mouse over to the target display any time I wanted to lock on to the ship in question. The game also has a strange bug where all of my joystick axises would get randomly inverted any time I restarted it, and before it was patched up, the game allegedly wouldn’t even accept most joystick inputs. Once again I find myself in a position of making comparisons to Freespace 2, a game that handled so many aspects of space combat perfectly (including control binding) that it consistently astonishes me how no other game developer ever wants to go to the effort of duplicating this functionality.

Sadly the inherent problems with the game run much deeper than this too. After some erratic play sessions, I soon found that the game was becoming inherently unstable. Not only are the initial load-up times incredibly long (and this is on my gaming beast of a PC with 2GB of RAM), but this is also one of the first commercial titles I’ve heard of that has problems working with ATI or nVidia’s system tray tools. So players out there finding themselves with a plethora of inexplicable crash problems should try right-clicking the ATI or nVidia icon on their systray and clicking “Exit”, which seems to fix these issues. It’s either that, or I was forced to randomly erase my main configuration file for the game (via the “My Documents” folder). It may sound harsh, but I really don’t consider issues like this to be acceptable in today’s gaming, and it’s just more-so a kick in the pants due to how rarely a space game with any kind of promise is released.

While I’m nit-picking, there are some other complaints I have about the gameplay too. Primarily, while the game does boast well over a hundred separate systems, the problem is that they’re all disturbingly similar. Sure, you get obvious changes in the backdrops and object types (depending on which race owns the sector), and some occasional environmental variances (such as one sector being laden with fog, others having a larger concentration of asteroids or strange metallic crystals, etc) – but other than this, you can fly into each and every sector knowing full well it will have a generic “Trade Station”, a generic warp gate, some equally generic asteroid or research stations littered throughout for good measure. The fact that players can do a jump from one sector to the next at almost any point (so long as there are no enemies nearby) also adds a kind of “cramped” feeling to the universe, as players aren’t limited in any way by fixed gates or jump points and it feels almost “too easy” to get around – at least in Freelancer one actually the beautiful scenery as an excuse to go exploring. And while the storyline isn’t too bad, some of the voice acting still leaves much to be desired – especially the “trade station lady”.

Before the wrap-up, I’d also like to discuss the game engine briefly. While the framerates are optimal for the most part, something worth nothing is that upon launch, the game actually had a major copy-protection issue that kept checking the game-data on the fly and killing framerates for customers until this check was eventually patched out. Smooth. Beyond this however, Darkstar One makes heavy use of shader and bloom effects to round off the different environments and lighting, and this reflects quite beautifully on the high-polygon ship hulls. However I was disappointed by the lack of any noticeable damage-effects from weapon impacts, and this tied into a huge complaint in how there was a lack of “feedback” from any time I took a big hit – I’d see a little red directional bar showing where the attack had come from, but have to physically look at the corner of my screen to notice my shields were almost gone, a problem which almost cost me my virtual-pilot’s life several times.

Ultimately, I have no problem with recommending Darkstar One to the casual fan just getting into the space-gaming market. For all intents and purposes, it makes for a functional and enjoyable experience, and the upgrade system alone adds quite a level of interest to help drive the experience forward. The problem is that veteran fans such as myself will have a field day in pointing out the game’s vital flaws, and the technical bugs alone don’t’ really help either. Regardless, is the game worth picking up, regardless of any past genre experience? Most certainly, but in light of the tremendous gap for improvement, don’t expect perfection.