Starshatter provides a welcome dose of innovation to a space sim genre that's been practically rendered extinct, but its originality ultimately fails to translate into a satisfying gameplay experience.

Once committed, combat typically unfolds quickly.

For most of the 1990s, space sims largely stuck to the formula of putting you into a small fighter craft and guiding you through a series of scripted missions. More recently, as the genre's popularity has faded, developers have attempted to rejuvenate commercial interest by aping the more open-ended, space privateer gameplay of even older classics such as Elite. Rather than copy this recent trend of focusing on exploration and trading, Starshatter sticks strictly to combat, but it provides a dynamic campaign and introduces flight sim and strategy game elements. Starshatter is essentially a rudimentary flight sim, a decent fighter-based space sim, and a simple real-time strategy game that lets you control capital ships. Each element of its hybrid gameplay package works relatively well, but none is singularly deep enough to offer a truly engaging experience.

Despite its ambitious design, Starshatter is largely the work of a single individual (Matrix Games picked it up for distribution solely online), and it's packed with user-friendly customization and modding options. You can opt to play the game with or without Newtonian physics, which cause your craft to indefinitely retain directional momentum, or you can have your ship automatically fire thrusters to partially compensate for those forces. You can choose to use traditional flight sim controls so that your craft will roll instead of turning when you push laterally on your controller (joystick, keyboard, or mouse), or you can control your ship entirely with a first-person, shooter-style mouselook setup. The heads-up displays can be heavily customized. There's also a variety of viewing perspectives, including a third-person perspective that's ideal for controlling capital ships as it effectively transforms the game into a real-time strategy game that resembles Homeworld.

Starshatter includes a mission and campaign editor, and it provides tools and instructions to let players add their own customized weapons, ships, planetary systems, and missions. While some aspects of Starshatter clearly highlight its limited production resources--graphics are respectable but not flashy, and sound and music are perfunctory--the game has been designed to make it relatively easy for motivated players to offer their own improvements. For instance, while the included mission briefings are displayed through text only, players designing their own campaigns can incorporate voice-recorded briefings. Starshatter deserves to be lauded for providing a comprehensive space sim toolkit in addition to an innovative game.

Starshatter's interface is also top-notch. In addition to displaying all relevant information in an organized and accessible fashion, the HUD interface is also interactive and lets you issue commands by mouse-clicking on displayed HUD readings. You can pause the game at any time to issue commands or to alter the perspective, which gives the game a much more strategic feel than most space sims. Instead of just barreling into combat and relying upon visible radar and targeting cues as in most space sims, you can pause and analyze a static battlefield from a heavily zoomed-out perspective to obtain a comprehensive picture of what's unfolding. This way you're less likely to overlook high-priority targets such as incoming torpedoes.

Aside from traditional space sim combat, Starshatter allows you to square off capital ships in Homeworld-style RTS battles.

Yet these innovations belie the game's comparatively simplistic combat gameplay. Fighters are fragile since they lack shields and because missiles are extremely effective. As a result, instead of taking down enemy fighters in prolonged dogfights, you're far more likely to be successful against a group of foes if you attack with missiles at extreme range. The craft you control are just as vulnerable as those you're fighting against, which compels you to maintain modest mission goals instead of striving to heroically dispatch hordes of enemies. Once you run out of missiles, it's very difficult to survive for long against multiple opponents, so you're frequently forced to cut-and-run unless you're close enough to friendly forces to quickly obtain reinforcements.