The flight simulation genre hasn't had a ton of standouts, and most of the memorable ones, even if you haven't played such games, have leaned heavily to the arcade style of one mission at a time. There have been many spacecraft simulators in the recent past, in which you pilot a ship all over the universe. However these games have had minimal success on computer platforms and the typical snotty-nosed Halo player, most likely has not played or heard of them. DarkStar One is trying to change that, by bringing a space sim experience to the consoles. When you have a niche game genre, when you're porting a keyboard control scheme to a console controller, and when you got a relatively unknown company, that usually spells disaster. Despite all that, DarkStar One is a shining example of bringing not only space flight simulation to the console, but almost anything typically thought of as only playable on a keyboard and mouse.
This game was originally released for the PC in 2006, by the German company Ascaron Entertainment. Yes, this game is almost half a decade old and is being ported to a console by a new publisher, the German company Kalypso Media (Americans can relate to them as the European distributor for the brilliant space RTS Sins of a Solar Empire). So with that history in mind, no one can look at this game as the next thing in gaming as it is essentially a re-release.
You will notice right away the poor presentation of the story. The voice work fits the dated graphics as you almost wish the cutscenes were replaced by dialogue boxes. Even putting the heavily "European" accents of all the characters aside, the voice work would even make the most naïve Star Wars fan roll their eyes. Then you move onto the actual script and you see the story just starts going and makes no attempt to separate itself from familiar plot devices of the "boy out to avenge his father's death" bit. And finally there is this strange cut-and-dry insertion of the cutscenes and dialogue. The examples are tiny cutscenes of a trade station for (I assume) showing up in a new area, though it didn't happen every time. And this one time I showed up in new cluster and there was some ship going after pirates, making a call for all pilots to help and they would get rewarded – sounded like a cool side quest. But when I got to the ship I didn't know where the enemies were, the ship kept doing a play-by-play of the "battle", and then the ship left telling everyone thanks for their help. I have no way of knowing what exactly I needed to do and what I missed. I was left to make my own interpretation, which was "you missed the boat on that one, tough."
This cut-and-dry nature of the game could be attributed to the fact that what may have been scroll-over-able icons on the PC are now just random icons with an unknown meaning on the 360. In a PC game there are constant text boxes and easily-accessible, stored information. I did not play this game on the PC so I don't know if maybe that experience was "holding the player's hand", but either way this game suffers from not doing a well enough job of explaining itself.
There is a brief tutorial to introduce you to the control scheme, but it should have gone a bit longer. One thing you pick up on is that the controls work on the Starfox level of fun. What you may not pick up on are the deeper mechanics of flight. Once you learn how to use the shoulder buttons properly, you will see how brilliantly the devs turned what must have been a fairly complex HUD into a nice wheel of options. And in a twist only possible from this kind of game, you probably won't fully understand what the face buttons are used for – I vaguely remember the someone mentioning the buttons, but a simple "refer to manual" would have done better. Three key controls are how the left trigger is used as your propulsion key in conjunction with the right stick; the ability to pick targets from a minimally cumbersome dropdown list; and that you can speed up time to automatically cover long distances. Despite this game not explaining the control setup well enough, you'll find a finely-tuned and fairly easy set of controls. It may take time to be familiar with them, but credit must be given for streamlining and allowing room for options in your piloting.
The game is equal parts exploration and space combat. Over time and with upgrades your ship becomes a small battleship, but early on you won't be too enthusiastic about the dog-fighting. The enemies aren't much of a challenge, and combined with the relatively tame speed of the game the combat may come across as fairly weak. But without question you would miss the combat if they took it away or watered it down any more. The end result is space combat that will neither blow you away nor disappoint.
Keeping with the flavor of cut-and-dry, one of the weakest elements of this game is telling what to do next. In a sense, this is a space sandbox game where you are free to go where you want. Even if you find the menu option that displays your main and side objective, you may still be lost. This is a throwback to the days where we didn't have highlighted arrows and floor-based conveyor belts (aka teleporters) carrying us to our objectives. There are also several key elements that are not fully explained. These include: trading, upgrading, artifacts, accepting missions, and side missions outside the trade station. Thanks to a message in my logbook, I found out how to play the markets (simple buy low and sell high concept), but everything else I met with uncertainty and still don't feel comfortable on the subjects; most of which involve exploration.
If you played the Mass Effect games, those games had light space exploration and no piloting of spacecraft. You could fly to clusters and move about the maps, but you were limited to the map of space and could only explore worlds on foot, or on foot inside your ship. In this game you can only explore while piloting your ship. In a way you are detached from your main character the entire time. This hurts the story and character-to-player connection, and it also severely limits your own experience. This focus and execution of space flight is by no means boring, you can be addicted to the markets and missions – especially if the concept of space interests you – but there is room for improvement, even only within the limits of being a space sim. Maybe walking around the space stations would be pointless, but Mass Effect's "ship of love" dynamic would certainly help break the monotony of the trade station menu between missions.
This game has no shortage of pure missteps as well. First being that transporting cargo requires your ship to move at half speed while also pulling the stuff behind you. It makes sense since your ship is not a transport craft, but the game could have easily not made this a core element and no one would have been sad. In combat you'll often find the enemy ships you chase just curve to and fro at a speed slower than you, so you are constantly running into them or going slow enough to be hit by others; stop-and-go combat adds another dimension of lameness to space fighting that it really didn't need. Bringing up the wheels of options does not pause the game unless you open a list, something that requires extra expertise to get right on the fly. And lastly, the graphics and sound are not horrible but you won't remember either aspects of this game. The backgrounds and backdrops of space are great, it's nice to see different hues in my gas giants, but everything technical about this game would have been possible in the last generation of consoles. Again, it came out in 2006, and by no means does it look bad, just not cutting edge.
When the phrases used to describe this game are "despite itself", "cut-and-dry", and "neither good nor bad" it probably paints the wrong picture. This game is fun, and could prove very addicting to the right kind of gamers. But it's niche, meaning you need the acquired taste for it. By staying within its own boundaries as a game genre, DarkStar One has no chance of appealing to anyone outside of its target audience, and possibly with the disappointing execution of the game elements, even that audience may shy away from this title. If you like space, if you ever wanted to fly around space using a controller, and if you can look past what the game is lacking, then DarkStar One could be one of the most unexpectedly-good games you've ever played.
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