Starport: Galactic Empires is surprisingly addictive for its seemingly lacklustre graphics and game play.
This time period mechanic is useful as it keeps each of the characters on roughly the same level, regardless of whether you are completely new to the game, or have been playing for months, it is likely that there will be a fairly new galaxy which will act as a level playing field. Of course, for those of us who like our rpgs more traditional, there are the permaverses in which you will never lose your character, and are free to level up all you like.
The gameplay is fairly straight forward, involving trading (from one of the titular Starports to another), fighting (hunting down pirates and doing escort missions) and taxiing (a fairly new concept for the rpg genre, in which you give lifts to people from Starport to Starport in exchange for money). However your method of controlling you ship is fairly unique. Instead of eve online's method of point-and-click movement (although this is available as well). The game adopts a more "spacewar like" approach to travelling through the aether. Your ship is controlled with the arrow keys, with the left and right to rotate, the forward to accelerate, and the shift key to boost. This mechanic works well, although as a new player it can be fairly annoying, bumping into planets and stars nearly all the time.
However, with this system, combat is frustrating, and often impossible. Because the "physics" engine uses your momentum, regardless of the way you are facing, shooting can be fairly difficult, especially when trying to shoot stationary gun turrets.
The trading system is fairly complex. When trading goods each Starport has a supply and demand for each commodity. This means trying to find star systems near to each other with opposing supply and demand is your main concern. This however is about where the system ends. Your actions do affect the supply and demand of your traded items, however, they don't affect it much, meaning that you have no real barriers to generating vast amounts of in game cash, with only your warp fuel to worry about.
As mentioned, the combat system is unsatisfying lacklustre; prompting me as well as many other players I'm sure to forgo it altogether. There are options to equip different weapons at one of the few "Starbases" however these weapons allow for no customisation. Your ship is also relatively uncustomisable, as you buy one of a number of pre-set ship types and are only able to change the main weapon, hold size and special items (like turrets and beacons).
However many of these flaws are outweighed by galaxy generation system. As mentioned, every time a galaxy "spawns" it is randomly generated, with a set of preset galaxy names, star types, and a couple of black holes sprinkled in for good measure. This means that most galaxies are huge. Even bigger than the ones in Sins of a Solar Empire, each galaxy in Starport contains upwards of a hundred star systems, each of which will have at least one planet, sometimes up to eight. This means that in some games, like those played in the blitzkrieg galaxy, the player will only see a tiny fraction of the galaxy before it is re-spawned. It also means that in the less crowded galaxies the player will go for hours on end only seeing another human once or twice. This really lets the player feel that they are part of something much bigger, and really goes a long way to the overall enjoyment of the game.
As mentioned before, the graphics and sound effects are nothing too special. They both seem fairly retro, and there is no voice acting to speak of (no pun intended). This will seem a little off putting to those gamers used to today's HD, 1080p, realistic textures and models, however it fits well with the games general feel as a kind of retro eve online and is understandable given its micropayment based funding.
Overall Starport is a game far above what it first seems. Unfortunately its first impressions are extremely low, so it doesn't have much to live up to. This is really just a free alternative to eve online, for those not willing to shell out the monthly fee, or with a way to low spec computer; however it is a good alternative, with much to offer.
In my opinion, this is a game to check out, if you like the whole space mmorpg thing and want something free, and light.