An enjoyable space adventure that doesn't require you to be controlling 50 different ships, just your own!
Having played most of the great space simulations such as freelancer, freespace 2 and the mighty X3, your reminded that there's much more to just flying around in space and blasting things. BUT DS1 does just that, its simply a space shooter, giving missions, collecting weapons, and doing a little trading on the side.
Your main objective is to follow the story line about some guy being betrayed and having his father killed. You must fly thru 300+ systems to find that person. You'll encounter many different species, and continually get harder and harder ships to beat. Your told about a mysterious green object that when collected can give your ship capabilities to upgrade to better systems, shields and better classes, then you can buy them at the local trade post. Your ship will last longer against the many villains that want you dead. Each system will have a warp gate, trade post, and maybe an asteroid field to search, but most of the time, the story will navigate you thru the large maps. You can mine asteroids, buy and sell different commodities or destroy the local freight ships for money, but I found this unecessary as doing the missions is enough to get you thru. Having spend a good 40 hours playing this, there's plenty of playability, although probably not replay value, as its really just a pretty shooter, and that's where the graphics shine.
The graphics on this game are quite stunning and you can check out my gameplay slideshow I did whilst playing. There are many different ships thruout the 300+ systems, all very well drawn, along with the space stations and ship wrecks. Each system can be very colourful, dark, misty as pea-soup or just full of rocks, but external views from your craft are very eye pleasing.
The sound is essential to your attacks as the lady co-pilot you pick up , will tell alot of what's going on around the ship. There's background music to listen to whilst flying around, and the usual laser blasts, and explosions.
I think the game was quite easy once as your ship easy outguns the competition later on, maybe a higher difficulty rating was in order, but I didn't need to trade at all to get all the weapons I needed. Still very enjoyable, go to it space fiends....