INTRO:
After the Wing Commander and X-Wing VS TIE Fighter series popularized the genre of games in which players control agile space-faring strike-craft, there had been plenty of attempts by other game-makers to enter this genre. As the years went on, one would think that the genre has waned, seeing that there are progressively fewer new titles for it.
Ascaron Entertainment would appear to be a little late to the party with its game, DarkStar One. Nevertheless, DarkStar One is an entertaining game, even if it has few designs that veterans of the genre would find refreshing.
PREMISE:
In a sci-fi future where humans co-exist with other aliens in an increasingly crowded galaxy, Kayron Jarvis is a young man who has had to live with his father’s death, in addition to his last wish of bequeathing a mysterious space-ship of unconventional design unto him.
After years of training to handle the curiously organic DarkStar One, a family friend tells the unusually patient Kayron about the circumstances behind his father’s death. Having decided that he knows the DarkStar One well enough to have it as his ride, Kayron heads out into the galaxy to find the truth behind his father’s death.
Along the way, he will encounter characters with various motivations, as well as more truth than that which he sought.
DARKSTAR ONE - HULL:
As mentioned earlier, the DarkStar One is a peculiar ship. It has a pseudo-organic hull that allows it to repair itself very quickly.
Of course, a sceptical person would argue that this convenient setting allows Ascaron to implement cheaply convenient gameplay features, namely regenerating health.
Anyway, the hull of the DarkStar One can be upgraded (more on upgrades later). Upgraded hulls not only make the DarkStar One look bigger and fatter, but also tougher. Considering that its health regeneration is percentage-based, increasing the ship’s durability is a good investment.
Moreover, a bigger hull allows the mounting of more automated turrets (more on this shortly), thus increasing the ship’s point defence capabilities. Bigger hulls also accommodate the mounting of bigger guns.
If there is an issue in the implementation of hull upgrades, it is that it is more than likely to be the player’s top priority for upgrades. Its benefits are more substantial than those from upgrading other parts of the DarkStar One, especially considering that having greater durability (coupled with the regenerating health mechanism) would have DarkStar One going further.
The game could have provided a more versatile experience if this had not been the case.
WINGS:
The wings of the DarkStar One contain secondary thrusters, which contribute to the maneuverability of the ship. Therefore, upgrading the wings of the ship increases its evasiveness, though of course, this requires the player to be skilled enough to exploit the improvements.
However, improving the wings of the DarkStar One also comes with a caveat; its wings become longer, which means that it becomes a larger target. On the other hand, the increased wing sizes do allow the player to mount more main weapons, which certainly more than compensate for the increased vulnerability.
ENGINES:
The engines do not only include the propulsion systems of the DarkStar One, they also encompass the reactors that power its weapons and its shields.
Indeed, upgrading engines versus wings is an important consideration. Having more main weapons and faster yawing and rolling can be handy during battles, but so is having more fuel for the DarkStar One’s afterburners and having more energy to fire weapons for longer periods. Most importantly, the engines determine how often the DarkStar One’s plasma cannon can be used; the plasma cannon will be described shortly.
PLASMA CANNON:
The inappropriately-named “plasma cannon” is a special device on the DarkStar One that can be used in many ways except for being used as a “plasma cannon” archetype of sci-fi weapons. Indeed, this may come as a surprise and disappointment to ardent fans of sci-fi.
This may well be a translation issue. After all, the game was originally in Deutsch, and unfortunately, DarkStar One would feed the stereotypical perception that Deutsch games do not survive transition to English in one piece.
Anyway, if one could forgive this oddity in the English naming of the gameplay elements in this game, the “plasma cannon” is a very handy tool to use during battle. Its charge, which builds up automatically, can be dispensed to produce various effects, such as boosting the firepower of the ship’s weapons.
Other powers are unlocked as the game progresses, with the exception of one power that is only unlocked after the player has obtained every “alien artifact”, which will be described later. This power is very handy and can circumvent a lot of the game’s intended difficulty, so it is perhaps a worthwhile reward for all that trouble.
Making use of the plasma cannon is an important tactic in battles, though its use is fortunately not always required.
WEAPONS & TURRETS:
The DarkStar One can mount weapons on its wings. These are player-controlled, and would be quite familiar with players that have experience in games with space-dogfights. The player must more or less line up the DarkStar One with the target and lead it before firing its weapons.
Then, there are turrets. These are not entirely player controlled, but they will target an enemy that the player has selected as a priority, if it is within range. Otherwise, the turrets fire on the nearest enemy target.
Considering that enemies can restore their shields, having the turrets do their own thing is not a good idea because their firepower would be wasted if it is not concentrated on a single target. In other words, a skilled player that realizes this would treat the turrets as nothing more than main weapons with auto-targeting.
There may be different types of weapons and turrets, but the differences between them are little more than mere statistics. To elaborate, every weapon and turret has ratings on projectile speed, firing rate and energy consumption. The different guns, as associated with different races in the DarkStar One universe, are mostly and merely different in these regards.
Perhaps the only notable weapons and turrets are the Spore projectiles that are invented by the Arrack race. These can damage both shields and hulls, which do make them more tactically useful.
Otherwise, the game follows the usual trope of having the weapons and turrets advance in statistics, as represented by increasing marks, as the story escalates. There are even cheesy attempts at trying to cosmetically improve this system, by the game’s use of labels such as “military” and “elite” classes of weapons.
There are so-called “Secret Service” variants of these marks that are substantially more efficient than their regular counterparts. Coincidentally, acquiring access to these requires some legwork, which adds some fun to an otherwise boring system of upgrading the weapons and turrets of the DarkStar One.
FLUXES:
Flux devices help the player manage the ship’s rechargeable statistics. There are two: energy and shield fluxes.
The energy flux allows the player to shuffle more energy from the ship’s reactors to the weapons or shields, at the expense of the shields or weapons, respectively. This can be very handy, especially for opening battles with, when the enemy may not have the time they need to quickly bring down the DarkStar One’s existing shields.
Interestingly, ships have separate shield ratings for their front and rear halves. Although the A.I. in the game is generally not too clever enough to take advantage of this, the player can; the shield flux happens to be a device that helps the player do this. It can shuffle shield strength between the rear and front of the DarkStar One. This can be difficult to do in battle, but utilizing it is a mark of difference between a skilled player and a lesser one.
SCANNERS:
The player may be able to see objects in space, especially if they are large enough, but they only appear on the ship’s scanner after they get into its range. The scanner provides information such as shield strengths of the selected ship and the disposition of its crew towards the player. The player can improve the range of the scanner by upgrading it.
Other than these cookie-cutter designs, there does not seem to be anything noteworthy about the scanners.
EXPENDABLE EQUIPMENT:
The most notable expendable type of equipment is missiles. The DarkStar One can ever only carry up to 25 of these, but they can be of a mixture of different types of missiles (however, the player can only have a few Big Bang missiles; more on these later). The player needs to stock up on missiles, and this costs money.
Unfortunately, in practice, the missiles are not always worth the money. Swarm missiles are effective against fast targets, but the player must follow up quickly with shots from the DarkStar One’s weapons and turrets, because they cannot drop shields readily. Dumb-fire missiles are only effective on big and slow targets such as frigates, and these are so rare. Even rarer are cruiser-class vessels, of which Big Bang missiles are made for.
The other expendables may seem a lot more useful though. For example, there is the Afterburner Booster, which refills the fuel for the DarkStar One’s afterburners. Another example is the Graviton Boost, which increases the ship’s speed.
However, the player is prevented from exploiting them too much by virtue of limited capacities for the hoarding of these tools.
OTHER EQUIPMENT:
Interestingly, the DarkStar One is not a cargo ship, yet the game comes with the blurb that there is trading in the game. The developer solved this by simply having the DarkStar One seemingly tow cargo containers behind it via invisible links. However, the inertia of the DarkStar One is apparently increased, and the cargo can be damaged by direct fire.
Therefore, it is not in the player’s interest to engage enemies while towing cargo, but the player can always release cargo at any time and pick it up again later (though certain enemies, namely pirates, may attempt to steal the cargo).
All these are made possible via the sci-fi convenience of the “cargo computer”, which manages the invisible links and the drones that help the player pick up cargo.
The Energy Collector is the device that governs the player’s ability to jump between star systems. In practice, it is more of a nuisance because it forces the player to wait before he/she can move to another star system after having already moved to the current one.
The Jammer is a situational device that is only useful for smuggling missions. Smuggling missions require the player to ferry illegal stuff to other places, and it so happens that there will almost always be officers who insist on checking cargo. Unfortunately, the Jammer’s success is ultimately luck-based, so such missions can be an annoyance to some, and the device itself may seem useless for anything else.
The Landing Computer allows the player to initiate a cutscene to have the DarkStar One automatically dock with a space station or a vessel of similar size; upgrading it increases the range at which the computer can be triggered. However, the game could have been better off by having this in-game device as an actual feature of user-friendliness instead.
MISSIONS:
Kayron cannot go around looking for clues about his father’s demise without earning the trust of the people whoc can tell him where to go to, so he must do missions for them as a favour in return.
He is also likely to get into scraps more often than not, so the DarkStar One has to be kept competitively armed, protected or otherwise adequately equipped for hairy situations. This cannot be done without the funds to obtain the necessary hardware, and to obtain these funds, Kayron has to perform missions in order to get paid with the needed monies.
These missions, which the player can register for at space stations, appear varied enough, initially. For example, there are escort missions where the player must protect trade vessels from being attacked, courier missions in which the player play fetch and carry, and search-and-destroy missions, of which bounty-hunts are part of. Most of these would seem quite standard-fare for people that have experienced games such as Privateer.
There are a few types of missions that could have been noteworthy, such as missions that require the player to take photos or eavesdrop on conversations before leaving. Unfortunately, these missions become nothing more than having the player go to some location, staying a while and returning back, sometimes with enemies in hot pursuit.
Eventually, after doing enough missions, the player may have gained enough money to forgo most missions altogether, except the ones that are crucial for advancing the story with. The money can then be used for engaging in another aspect of gameplay, which will be described shortly.
TRADING:
In lieu of doing missions, the player can have Kayron trading goods. There are several different types of goods, but ultimately they have the same one function, which is to be merely used as exchange materials.
Different space stations around the galaxy stock different goods at varying levels of availability (which is simply depicted via coloured bars). The player’s aim in trading is to simply buy low and sell high, i.e. buying cheap goods that are common at certain space stations and then dump them in space stations that do not have many of such goods.
Trading is an easy way to build up funds, but unfortunately, it is also quite boring. Pirates may try to attack the player, but that is just about the only excitement to be had in this side activity.
MINING:
The DarkStar One can also engage in some mining, which is easier than it sounds. The player only needs to blow up asteroids that contain ores, after which the same system that handles cargo towing would collect the ores. There may be some unwanted guests that saunter over to steal the ores, but of course the player can shoot the heck out of them for their audacity.
There are different ores, but the differences between them are merely their fetching prices at the market. In fact, asteroid fields often appear close to space stations, pretty much serving the role of spare change, if the player has come up short on the funds to purchase an item.
There is a lost opportunity for the implementation of more uses for ores.
ARTIFACTS:
To upgrade the DarkStar One, the player needs to collect glowing green artifacts. Conveniently, these artifacts appear to have no useful properties, but only reveal their purpose when they come into the vicinity of the DarkStar One, which eagerly absorbs it and becomes stronger.
Certain artifacts are within asteroids or other stranger places, waiting for the DarkStar One to come. It so happens that the DarkStar One is one of few vessels capable of detecting them. Getting into the cramped and sometimes dark spaces that they are in can be nerve-wracking the first few times around, but rarely anything surprising happens in these places. This is a lost opportunity to make this part of the game more entertaining.
Having heard that Kayron Jarvis is looking for artifacts to pimp the DarkStar One with, there are also folks that conveniently offer the otherwise useless artifacts as payment for missions that Kayron performs.
Certain artifacts are within the possession of other people who are not willing to give them up without a fight. Unfortunately, the only way to get at these is to destroy their vessels – an act which some people would not take kindly to, especially the current system’s police forces.
CLASSES:
In an attempt to inject some more RPG elements into the game, Ascaron included a system that grants a title to the player and the benefits (and problems) that go with it, depending on the player’s actions outside of the plot.
As an illustrative example, the player can have Kayron going around attacking cargo ships and stealing their cargo. Doing this repeatedly will eventually mark out the player as a known pirate, and as a consequence, cargo ships are immediately hostile to the player and may also have escort ships that immediately engage.
This system of classes is purely only there for gameplay purposes. They do not contribute to the story at all. Even if the player has Kayron going on a murderous spree, no story-related character will take note of this and Kayron remains a relatively good-hearted person in narrative terms anyway.
SYSTEMS IN THE GALAXY:
Although Kayron may be setting out into the galaxy to find the truth, he cannot move to anywhere he likes. Incidentally, progress through the game’s story is measured by how many regional systems of the galaxy that the player has unlocked for travel to.
The keys to the locked systems have to be obtained by completing special missions. These missions are usually not affiliated with the main story of the game and usually concern relations between Kayron and representatives of certain species in the galaxy. They are more interesting than most randomized missions however, and they are some of very few missions that feature cruiser-class vessels.
ENEMIES:
There is not much to say about the enemies that the player would encounter within the game. Most of them are fighter-type vessels, not much bigger or smaller than the DarkStar One. The player is often outnumbered, but most such vessels are usually hopelessly outclassed by the DarkStar One – assuming that the player had been going around collecting artifacts and learning how to exploit the DarkStar One’s advantages.
Even though different vessels may be made or piloted by people of different civilizations, they still appear to fight in the same manner. They move to engage if they are hostile, and most will attempt to flee via hyper-jumps when they are severely damaged. It is rare indeed to see them performing any teamwork beyond simply trying to swarm all over the player; although their strength in numbers would help against an unskilled player, skilled ones would not have issues systematically eliminating them.
Enemies that are not fighter-class vessels can be a problem though. They may be frigates, cruiser-class vessels or weapons-platforms, all of which are different beasts to deal with. More often than not, shooting their hulls is not enough. They often have hardpoints that are packed with powerful capital-ship-grade weapons, which can rip even the DarkStar One apart if the player does not consider thinning out their firepower first.
Picking the hard-points off and evading strike-craft that are harrying the DarkStar One can be satisfying experiences. This, of course, would be nothing new to players that have seen more epic battles that are the space versions of David-versus-Goliath.
The only memorable enemies are those that concern the main plot of the game, but to describe them would be a spoiler, of course. Still, it has to be said here that they are not remarkable enough to be iconic moments in the history of the genre of games that DarkStar One belongs to.
CHARACTER DESIGNS:
Ascaron Entertainment and DarkStar One would not be breaking the stereotype that German game-makers can barely design deeply interesting characters any time soon.
Kayron Jarvis could have been potentially remarkable, but as the cover art for the game would suggest already, he is little more than a meat-head. Of course, his earnest eagerness is not a weakness in his character and he is typically attractive for a protagonist, but his character design is quite cookie-cutter. The same could be said about Eona, a friend that Kayron would come to know.
The non-human characters in the game could have been more interesting, but there are so many typical human qualities to their personality design. In fact, the backstory of the civilizations of other sapient species appear to have been cooked up just to culminate in the typical story-telling trope of a grand cross-species alliance.
GRAPHICS:
DarkStar One may not contribute much of anything new to its genre, but at least it is a pretty game.
Firstly, the best graphical designs of the game are to be described, and these concern the titular ship itself. There is a clear sense of progression, as well as satisfaction, to be had from pursuing alien artifacts in order to upgrade the DarkStar One. Each upgrade that is purchased with the accrued alien artifacts changes the appearance of the DarkStar One visibly.
Considering that different upgrades can be purchased in different orders, this can result in many permutations of looks for the DarkStar One. For example, the player can forgo hull upgrades for the others, which will result in the DarkStar One looking like it has more wings than fuselage, amusingly.
Of course, one can argue that such permutations are possible because the visual changes to the different parts of the ship do not happen to overlap. As an elaborative example, the polygons for the wings always protrude from the outermost polygons of the hull. Therefore, there is conveniently no chance for visual glitches, such as unsightly clipping of polygons.
Anyway, the DarkStar One is the most visually distinct fighter-class vessel in the game. The others are mainly designed according to their racial preferences. However, it may be a bit difficult to appreciate their cosmetic differences during heated dogfights. Still, if one was to examine them when the opportunity arises, there are some interesting designs, such as the ships of a certain race resembling octopi.
The much larger space-borne vessels, not including space stations, are rare, but when they do appear, their scale is impressive. The cruisers, in particular, look fittingly intimidating. Speaking of the space stations, space stations of different races share almost the same silhouettes, with the differences between them being mainly in their textures and color schemes. This can be a bit disappointing.
Being a space shooter title, it is important that DarkStar One has skybox textures that convince the player that he/she is in space. DarkStar One does not disappoint in this regard, at least most of the time, but some textures are so bland as to be little more than white specks of various luminosities on a black background.
SOUND DESIGNS:
Like its graphics, the sound designs of DarkStar One are just satisfactorily pleasing, but not particularly remarkable.
If there is anything worth praising about its sound designs, it is that DarkStar One bucks the expectation of bad dubbing for games of Deutsch origins. Most of the dialogue and subtitles in the game appear to be without transliteration issues.
On the other hand, there may be some campy statements coming from certain characters, which include Kayron himself. Although this is perhaps acceptable, it can be awkward to hear similar cheesy statements coming from the alien characters.
Speaking of the alien characters, they are voiced with the usual tropes of alien voices, such as a throaty gargle for the more boisterous aliens and hissy voices for the reptilian ones. Players that already have plenty of experience with sci-fi space stories would not find anything new to listen to from the non-human characters.
(The Thul may be a bit interesting to such players though, because they appear to be exclusively female and cyborg. Of course, they could be alluding to the Borg in Star Trek.)
The sounds of ships and ship battles are similarly unremarkable. Lasers go pew-pew, whereas heavier weapons emit deeper noises and missiles whoosh as they careen towards the target. They are all satisfactory, but again, not particularly memorable.
(Of course, one can argue that hearing things in the vacuum of space is hardly believable, but then the game would have been very boring otherwise.)
CONCLUSION:
DarkStar One is a space shooter that follows many of the solid designs that its compatriots in the genre have done before. The upgrade system for the titular ship and its flux devices could have made the game more unique, but it is otherwise plain.