Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Mixed reactions"

Space strategy games are a curious animal. You start on an empty starmap and hope to spread your faction's color across known space, using a combination of planning, exploration, diplomacy, and engagement to prevent the other factions from spreading their color. That's basically what you do in 4x, and what makes this genre curious is that the threat of tedium is always present. Managing a vast space empire can be a lot of work. A good 4x game finds ways to be just engaging enough in its more mundane gameplay elements that it doesn't feel like work. Unfortunately, Stardrive falls short in this one essential quality.

On the surface, Stardrive starts with a lot of promise. You can choose between eight different race archetypes, or make your own variation through an ingenious system of benefits and penalties. If you put more points into a beneficial trait, you must also put points into a negative trait to balance the scales. This assures that no race has inherent advantages over any other race, so trait allocation is largely a matter of gameplay preference. On the subject of the races, it must be said that their visual design and animation (via the diplomacy screen) is nothing short of stellar, looking almost out of place compared with the graphics and audio in the rest of the game, which are passable at best. Still, it is a significant upgrade in presentation from what the Galactic Civilizations series gave us a few years back.

Stardrive is worth comparing to Gal Civ not just because it is a game in the same genre, but because it is so clearly inspired from it. The planetary management screen is so similar to what's seen in Gal Civ, you could be forgiven into thinking this is Galactic Civilizations 3. It isn't, for reasons both good and bad. On the positive side, ship design and combat are much more fundamental in Stardrive's core gameplay. Designing your own starships is a joy in and of itself, with a reasonable level of depth and intuitiveness. Through trial by fire, you'll quickly discover what constitutes a crap design and can go back to the drawing board to correct weaknesses, or to design a specialty craft to deal specifically with whatever your opponents are throwing at you. Combat is satisfying to watch, and though the game gives you the option of controlling one of your ships directly, it's not essential to achieve good results. Watching starships slug it out with missiles, shells, and lasers never gets old, and Stardrive gives the additional benefit of having these battles play out in real time under player input as opposed to an instanced computer-controlled battle like what is seen in Gal Civ or the more recent Endless Space. It's not quite as engaging as combat in Sins of a Solar Empire, but the ability to create custom ships helps to keep the action fresh. Where Stardrive drops the ball is in administrating the empire you work so hard to create through force of arms.

From the beginning, the player is at something of a loss as to how to proceed. The tutorial covers only the most basic controls and gameplay elements, and then you are on your own. Skimpy tutorials can be forgiven if the gameplay is intuitive enough to figure things out yourself, but even veterans of the 4x genre will be hard-pressed to fathom how trade works and how to get your colonies running effectively. Colonial management can be delegated to the AI if you wish, but as with all such setups, letting the computer run your empire is an exercise in head scratching and muttered curses. Upkeep costs play a big role in Stardrive, and a computer-controlled player faction generates so much upkeep in the form of unnecessary freighters and subspace extenders that you'll either be running perpetual deficits or be forced to keep research funding stagnant. For the dedicated player of 4x, who prefers a more hands-on approach to administrating an empire, this is a minor issue. Unfortunately, taking the reins yourself quickly exposes Stardrive's most glaring flaw; the inability to control what struggling colonies most need to survive and flourish: freighters. A new outpost on a barren rock, unless it's an exceptionally rich barren rock, is completely incapable of growing on its own. To make the colony useful, goods have to be brought in from the core worlds to fund structures to improve the planet. Where in any other 4x game this process would be a simple point and click on the freighters you wish to form a trade route, Stardrive introduces the concept of faith-based trade – meaning you determine which planets import or export food and production, and then watch as your freighters, maybe, follow through on the policy ten minutes after you decide upon it. If that sounds like fun to you, you'll be even more thrilled to observe your freighters flying right by fully-stocked worlds close to the frontier in favor of traveling halfway across the galaxy to pick up the same goods from your homeworld. Freighters are slow beasts of burden, and you'll be counting the hours of your life ticking away while the skippers of these tugs go their own merry way in deciding who loads their cargo and where to take it. While freighters have the option of being assigned a zone of operation, in practice this does very little to alleviate the issue. You can assign them to a narrow box of operation and they still won't behave smartly or quickly, if they act at all. The agonizing slowness at which your empire grows more than counterbalances the fun of ship combat. At no point is this snailfest at all enjoyable.

And the freighter woes are not the only issue plaguing Stardrive. In my playthrough the espionage system was completely broken, or at least my faction's espionage was. Training ten agents to maximum level did basically nothing to counteract enemy plots against my planets, and for some reason I couldn't assign my agents to anything other than training missions. After a 100+ hour campaign, the great majority of the damage done to me was through enemy rebellion plots. And in the campaign's later hours I was getting insurrection notices every 4 – 5 minutes, despite having over four million credits in the bank and gaining hundreds of creds every turn. Few things are more irritating than getting one of these warnings while you're in the middle of assaulting an enemy planet, hoping to cleanse it of population and troops without leveling every building that would make the planet worth taking - which your fleets WILL do without specific direction and babysitting. Assaulting a planet with ground forces is also an option, but in practice this is no less destructive than a disciplined orbital bombardment. Controlling ground forces manually is problematic and often results in friendly fire and unwanted collateral damage. The computer does a good enough job of controlling the troops; in fact it is about the only thing the computer does demonstrably better than the player.

And then there is the sense that the game released in a less than complete state. Over the course of a campaign you'll make first-contact with a peaceful pre-warp civilization, and hard contact with high-tech remnants of an advanced one. While destroying Remnant ships can open a small tech-tree of useful upgrades (as in two techs small), there is apparently no reward for the first-contact event. As this last is handled by a wall-of-text instead of a visual representation – like with the other spacefaring races - there is no real benefit for its being included, unless it's just an unfinished idea.

All the flaws taken together; the poorly designed trade system, broken espionage, unfinished elements, and numerous other minor gripes (who lost a well-designed capital ship on account of a small enemy ship exploding on top of it?) lead me to believe that Stardrive is still a game that is essentially in beta. Periodic crashes do nothing to dissuade me of this conclusion. In the end, Stardrive's innovative foray into the 4x arena is hard to recommend with all the tedium involved in playing it. There is great potential here, and the promise that it will one day be worth the $30 price tag is enticing to many. But I must review the product in front of me rather than its future potential. Presently, Stardrive is limping along on impulse power.