Ingenious in places, mediocre in others. It's difficult to call DarkStar One good OR bad...
Gameplay: 20 / 30
Graphics & Visuals: 14 / 20
Sound & Music: 10 / 20
Narrative / Innovation / Misc: 14 / 20
Personal Slant: 5 / 10
=New Alliance ComNet Score: 63 / 100 (50 is average)
=Gamespot Score: 7.0 (6.0 is average, 0.5 increments)
Stability: Some issues impairing enjoyment of the game (3)
Darkstar One may be getting on a bit now, but it was only recently that I found the time to play through it from start to finish. When I first picked up the game, it seemed pretty solid. Enjoyable close-range dogfights, good keyboard and mouse controls and easily accessible trading that didn't require me to take a degree in advanced theoretical economics. Voice acting was a little dodgy, but I could live with that. However, after the first quarter of the game, the shine started to wear off...
Graphically, DSO is not at all bad. It's not cutting edge but it's perfectly adequate. There are moments of real beauty with all the standard genre components: Nebulae, gas giants, solar flare and sleek starships. Violent explosions and hyperspace events in vast debris fields. Lighting and shadowing is good, although occasionally light spills through solid objects. However, Ascaron have failed to make the best of the scenery. There are only a couple of ships for each race - two fighters, two cruisers - and only a couple of variations of each type of station (and there are only really two - trade and research). This is unfortunate, since the 300 star systems you can visit are also mostly cut-outs of each other. With only 2 or 3 exceptions, every system you enter has an identical layout: One warp gate, one trade station (which is the only thing you can dock at), some planets (one of which you can usually fly into if you want to die) and an asteroid or ice field. Some systems have research stations, but you can't dock there or do anything with them unless required by the storyline. If you're really lucky, there will be a pirate base which you can attack. Individual star systems simply have no personality. Fortunately, combat is quite fun. It uses a very 'freelancer' physics system, so your ship goes where ever you point it, regardless of Newtonian physics. You have a variety of energy weapons to choose from, each of which have different fire-rates and come in either a player-controlled bow cannon or an auto-firing and tracking turret. Firing weapons depletes your weapon capacitor which must recharge when empty and getting hit depletes your shields. Missile launchers are also available to deliver more explosive power in tight battles.
And then, there is the Darkstar One's unique weapon: The Plasma Cannon. The plasma cannon produces a variety of effects, depending on what upgrades you apply throughout the game. It can recharge your weapons and provide extra damage, recharge your shields, down an enemy's shields, make your ship invincible for a few seconds or even freeze surrounding enemies in time. On the default difficulty setting, combat is reasonably easy for most of the game. Starfighters and 'Thul drones' explode reasonably easily, although some pirate bosses may cause you issues early in the game. Cruisers are a greater challenge, but appropriate use of your torpedo launcher and plasma cannon should pull you through.
There are two examples that really stand out in terms of gameplay. A couple of times, you will be called to take the DarkStar One into the atmosphere and fight in the sky, or in a huge base, or even (star wars style) within a vast mothership. These are exhilarating battles, and its a pity that there are so few opportunities to take the ship to the surface. Meanwhile, the infamous second Flak mission which puts you in defence of a research station is so fiendishly, unreasonably difficult that it made me want to just give up. While the standard bounty hunting missions and trade runs (legal or not) become boring (which they will by the end), each cluster of stars has a special side mission. It's not always made completely clear what you will have to do in order to complete these missions, but they provide a good deal of variety and are mostly well designed. You can also liberate star systems (which yield valuable artefacts used to upgrade your ship) by flying into pirate occupied space and pretty much shooting everything in sight. Finally, tracking down and eliminating pirate bosses will yield special weapons that you can fit to your ship or sell for large amounts of cash. The variety of different activities you can perform is impressive, but sadly it makes the lack of variety elsewhere in the game more glaringly obvious. Ascaron have really tried here, but it's all a little inconsistent. The most interesting and innovative feature of DarkStar One is the ship itself. While it starts off as a fairly average light fighter, collecting organic artefacts left behind by an ancient people and scattered through the galaxy will allow you to improve your ship. The artefacts work in the same way as Experience Points in a traditional RPG, and every time you collect enough you can 'level up' your ship. This allows you to improve fire-power, manoeuvrability or recharge rates, change the appearance of your ship and upgrade the plasma cannon.
But for every innovative or well executed feature added by the developers, there's something to let it down as well. This time it's the sound. Don't get me wrong, sound effects are positive, explosions are suitably... explosive, and the music, while not particularly memorable, is of a good standard. But all of this pales in comparison with the terrible... horrible... atrocious voice acting! The lead character sounds like he was someone pulled off the street at random (as do most of the minor characters), and while some of the major characters sound like they've acted before, very few of them actually sound good. Occasionally dodgy translation also contributes to the effect, especially when you have the lead character taunting the enemy with phrases like "You will SOON fall into obliviON" (emphasis in original). It's poor localisation which is particularly upsetting as the original German version is probably very good. As we all know, character = story. Without characters, your narrative means nothing. The poor standard of voice acting and (in places) translation reduces the characters to nothing more than irritating distractions, deprives them of their original characterisation and so completely and utterly ruins the telling of the story. According to the manual, Kayron (the main character) has "a winning personality that everyone finds hard to resist". I find this an odd statement, since he seems to have no character at all! He's not the eager but naive rookie, or the experienced pilot embittered by revenge, or even the enigmatic but gifted prodigy. I expect he does have a character, but it was just lost in translation (and voice acting). In fact, the only well defined characters in the game are the aliens, and even they are mostly personifications of their race's characteristics.
Still, occasionally a bit of storyline manages to break through the localisation, and the finale is genuinely impressive. However, when you compare it with the generally high standard of voice acting in Freelancer and the outstanding storytelling in that game, you will still find DSO sadly lacking in this area.
Last but not least, there are a few technical issues with DarkStar One. First, I was completely unable to get the game to start at 1680*1050, my monitor's native resolution, before or after applying the latest 1.3 patch. It works at every other resolution, but setting to 1680*1050 produces an immediate crash to the desktop with a "Walhalla Error". A couple of other times during the game, I got a crash to the desktop with an unhandled exception for no clear reason. Finally, after finishing the game and obtaining the Zero Point jump drive (which allows me to visit any system instantly - although why would I want to when they're all the same?), I flew back to the starting system and requested permission to dock at the trade station (which was marked as neutral in my target list). On final approach, all my automated turrets started to fire on the station for no adequately explained reason. Since you cannot stop them from firing, and since I was surrounded by police and no further than ten meters from a pair of gun turrets, that was where I chose to end my game. Not the best way to finish a game I had mixed feelings about.
DSO is not a bad game, and anyone who says it is is probably overstating the game's faults. Having said that, I wouldn't want to say that it's actually good either, at least not after the combat loses its edge. It's worth a look for fans of the genre, but don't let anyone tell you that it's better than Freelancer, because I'm sorry to say that it isn't. I'm sorry, because Freelancer is an old game now and I think it's time someone actually did turn out something better. After playing this game right through, I am unable to name a single system from the game, because they are all the same - unlike Freelancer's Sirius sector. There's no equivalent for the bustling and optimistic New York system, the vast, empty ice fields of Magellan or the polluted and radioactive wastes of Leeds. It's also worth noting that there is no multiplayer component and only a very limited number of available mods. If there is a recent starfighter-sim that can beat Freelancer overall, I'm afraid you're not looking at it. DarkStar One is just too inconsistent, and the things it does well are offset by the things it does very poorly. DSO could have been outstanding with some adjustments but as it stands it is merely above average. What a poor epitaph for the starfighter-sim genre...
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VERDICT: Decent, but let down by some significant flaws
NA: 63
GS: 7.0