Items aren’t worth filthy amounts of money, so you won’t be making huge profits even if you buy cheap and sell expensive, and there’s set trade routes like you’d find in, well, better games of this type. Trading, which again isn’t explained at all well in the game, is a simplistic affair. The game doesn’t explain any of that particularly well, or maybe it does if you have bionic fucking eyes. These often are the difference between success and Buddy Holly and thankfully they don’t have much of a cooldown time either. Plasma allows you to activate weapon and shield boosts, EMPs and timefreezing abilities – selectable with the left dpad control and usable with the Y button. The other type of upgrade relates to your plasma weapon and you unlock upgrade points by wiping out pirate gangs. These are made possible by collecting alien artifacts (which are handily marked out on your system map) and allow you to upgrade your hull, wings and engines in order to improve your defence, weapons and manoeuvrability. Taking down some of the bigger ships without them can be tricky but the challenge is worthwhile and you do have some extra tricks up your sleeves.Īs you progress, there are two types of upgrades made available to you. On the ‘oh dear’ side of things, missiles are best left out of your arsenal altogether as selecting the right missile with the d-pad and launching it with the B button when your thumbs and forefingers are committed to other, more important, things is a considerable chore. Targeting is made easier by showing you where to aim in relation to the movement of the bogeys and later on, when you equip some auto-aim turrets, your odds of survival increase dramatically allowing you to really tear into gangs of enemy ships. Sure, it’s a little limited by the capabilities of the joypad (the mouse controls on Freelancer are still my favourite thing about the PC) but dogfighting with pirate scum is a surprisingly smooth experience. Whenever you deviate from the story to go and make fat stacks, the game steps up massively thanks to the enjoyable combat. I mean despite these failings (and I’m really only scratching the surface so far), the game is addictive and hugely relaxing. As a result I found myself losing interest in the plot faster than you lost interest in the Wii. To further rub salt into the wounds, any accompanying text is so small and fiddly that you wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the producer on this game was some sort of bird of prey. Hearing badly written dialogue delivered by inept English voice actors is a frankly harrowing experience with the mood only being raised by 90% of the pirates in the game sounding exactly like Stewie Griffin. This game makes the ‘well met, aye!’ bollocks from Two Worlds look adequate. So far, so not interested.Īny potential the story may have had is brutally beaten out of the game with a combination of dreadful cutscenes and some of the worst voice acting ever committed to tape. By this I mean earning space bucks for hunting down pirates, delivering cargo, escorting freighters and trading goods between planets in order to buy better weapons and equipment for the Darkstar so that you can get out there and solve the mystery of your dad’s death. So after a brief tutorial mission, you are given free reign to go out there and get your Elite on. He had been working on the ship for years, galvanising it with alien technology, making it the best ship in the known universe. I can never resist a lemon.ĭarkstar One’s plot sees you, a recently-qualified space pilot, inheriting your dad’s ship – the titular Darkstar One – after his suspicious death. Still, I detected the citrusy smell and dove in. The bad news is that it’s a straight port of a four-year old PC game that was never that highly regarded.
Well it’s here now and the good news is that it doesn’t massively suck. Along with light gun games, a decent Elite/Freelancer clone is what the 360 has been missing. Still there was hope for a while when Ascaron announced an Xbox 360 version of their space-trading-combat-‘em-up, Darkstar One. All of it a damn sight cheaper than the shit we fork out for and all running at higher resolutions. They’ve got everything we’ve got and also proper FPS games, with mouse control and everything, RTS games that aren’t made of actual fail, Sim City things and well basically everything. It’s an epidemic frankly and whilst we’re here mashing Xs and Ys or squeezing the right trigger, the PC gamers are loving it.
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