Preview by: Mitch Dyer

I just warped into a system that’s suffering from a bad case of the space pirates. I need to kill ‘em all to collect on their bounty. I need that cash to buy a better warp drive, which will lead me to find my father’s killer. Before I can start searching for the pirates, however, a police vehicle matches my speed and starts scanning Darkstar One, my transforming space ship. Fortunately, I’m not carrying any contraband – not this time – so he leaves me to my business. From the get go, Darkstar One: Broken Alliance envelopes you in its established world.

A substantial part of what makes its world so engrossing is that you’re more than a gruff gun for hire. Correction, you’re actually less: You’re a lowly cargo pilot. And that makes your adventure all the more interesting. Sure, the sci-fi nerd in me would have liked an all-out action game – blasting through space with Apollo-esque badassery would have been rad. But that’s not what this is. Fortunately, Darkstar’s alternative solution strikes a similarly geeky chord inside me: This is the exact same stuff Han Solo was doing pre-Star Wars. There are plenty of upsides to that, but there’s one downside that might kill the potential for many players: It’s incredibly slow to get going.

The laid back, go-at-your-own pace piloting thing is going to satisfy a certain audience deeply, though. Before you get to go on big bounty hunts, and before buy new weapons, add-ons and upgrades for Darkstar One, you need to learn how to pick up cargo – or let it go if you come under fire – and to get it where it needs to be. There’s a lot of combat, to be sure, but there’s so much more to Darkstar One that I almost didn’t know what to do with myself. At any given moment I could load up on tradable stock, destroy squadrons of space pirates for huge hauls, or simply wander the star system in search of green goo to better my ship even further.

Broken Alliance gives you a lot of freedom to progress on your own, and in the few hours I spent in the cockpit I’d earned enough cash to blow on almost anything I wanted. From the start, even when it’s slow, Darkstar is immensely fulfilling. I constantly felt as though I had new things to use and play with, or that I had enough activities to keep me busy while I saved for new weapons, like stronger lasers and missile launchers, or parts, like the aforementioned warp drive.

I missed the 2006 PC version of Darkstar One, which Broken Alliance is based upon. Its unfamiliarity is exciting, and I’m anxious to see where it takes me from here, both in terms of the interesting story introduction and how I interact with the gargantuan, open universe. The game drops in North America on July 20th and we'll have a review ready to go.