It's a well documented fact that every child has, at some point, wanted to be an astronaut. I still remember standing up in my French lesson back at school, and proudly declaring "Je voudrais etre Cosmonaut!" (I would like to be an astronaut).
Nine years on, and little has changed. Well, I'm slightly taller and my voice is a bit deeper, but that desire to explore the furthest reaches of space is still there, and it's with the spirit of exploration in mind that I sat down to play Darkstar One, an outer space flight-sim/Role Playing hybrid.
You take the role of the suitably space age sounding Kayron Jarvis, who inherits the Darkstar One (the titular space ship, and an incredibly advanced piece of technology) from your deceased father, who was killed while out on an escort.
Now, the Darkstar One is no ordinary spaceship, as it has the ability to absorb alien "artifacts" (glowing green rocks mostly found inside large asteroids) and, basically, evolve. Each artifact allows you to upgrade a certain aspect of your ship, be it the wings, hull, engines, or the ship's Plasma Cannon, and your ship reflects these upgrades both visually and physically, sometimes unlocking new upgrades/equipment (upgrading your wings to make them longer allows you to equip more weapons, for example) as you go. This adds the a degree of personalisation to the game, as the way you begin to customize your craft will vary from player to player. Want to fly in all guns blazing? Use your artifacts to upgrade your cannon and hull armour. Fancy a more nimble, stealthy approach? Upgrade your engines and wings, for increased manoeuvrability.
See that big asteroid? Chances are there's an artifact somewhere inside it.
Because you can upgrade one of the three areas of the ship when you find enough artifacts, it's easy to upgrade the wrong part, and find yourself rather out of your depth a few missions later. When I picked up the first artifact, for example, my tutorial advisor told me I should use it on the Darkstar One's wings, to enable me to equip more weapons. I ignored this advice, and upgraded my ships hull. A few missions later, I had to take down some pirates before they destroyed a transport vessel, and while my ship laughed off any shots from the pirates, it was impossible to take the pirates out before the transport decided it had had enough, and promptly exploded. Luckily, what could have been a game-breaking mistake was easily rectified with a bit of time spent exploring. On the Galaxy map (where you set your next hyperspace jump location), Clusters which contain artifacts have a green icon next to them, so it's relatively quick and easy to find an artifact and level-up your ship if you ever find yourself underpowered.
The first few missions see you learning the ropes with the new craft, teaching you the basic controls, how to fly the ship, and the basics of interstellar dogfighting. The controls are pretty easy to get to grips with, with the left stick used to point your ship at where you want to fly/shoot, and the speed controls/roll on the right stick. The only real problem we've encountered with the controls is that there's no way of inverting your roll direction, so you'll often find your ship rotating the opposite way to how you wanted it to roll, if you're strange and insist on having inverted controls, like me.
Once you've got the hang of the Darkstar One, a friend of your late fathers reveals that all is not as it seems with the events surrounding his death - and so Kayron takes the Darkstar One and sets out to find the man who killed his father.
Luckily there's some variation in how the different clusters look, otherwise it'd get a bit boring as you leap from place to place.
From here on in, you're at liberty to explore the universe how you feel (well, sort of). Unfortunately you can't zip from one end of existence to the other in an instant, as A) Your ship doesn't have a powerful enough jump drive, and B) You don't have access to all the "warp gates" (hyperspace junctions that enable you to leap from one cluster to another in a matter of seconds). In order to unlock the warp gates, you need the key to each gate, which are gained as you progress through the story missions, opening up more and more of the universe as you gain more information on your father's murder and upgrade your ship sufficiently.
Because space itself is quite an inhospitable environment, and because you'll be visiting a few of the more seedy areas of the Galaxy, you'll quite often encounter various roughnecks as you make your way from point A to point B. Too many times you emerge from hyperspace (in a galaxy you're only visiting because your ship isn't powerful enough to make it to the target galaxy in a single jump) to be met with a gang of pirates, and you're in their way. If you're lucky, they'll be far enough away that your warp drive will have recharged before they get close, allowing you to use it again quickly to get away, but if they get too close, there's no choice but to fight them. The first few times this happens it's quite an adrenaline rush, as you outmanoeuvre the pirates and abolish them all in minutes, but when it happens two or three times in a single journey from one space station to the galaxy where a mission takes place, it's more than a little irritating, and makes them seem a lot less random than they should be.
You'll be seeing a lot of this on your travels.
There's a lot of little touches in Darkstar One that help to make it feel like the universe is a living, breathing thing. On approach to the Trade Station, you'll sometimes get scanned by a Police craft (to make sure you're not trying to smuggle anything into the Station), then once he's ok-ed your ship, you need to open a communication channel with the Station itself to request docking permission. It all serves to make it feel like you're a tiny part of this gigantic universe. There are even occasions when you drop out of hyperspace to find a group of rebels trying to take out a large pirate cruiser, and you can join the fight (on whoever's side you really want to) if you feel like it, or just carry on to wherever you were initially heading. By far our favourite of these little touches though, is the fact that you can open up a communication channel with the ships you're engaged in combat with, and trash talk them. Every one of our battles now is more of a war of words than of weapons, with the airwaves full of cries of "I've got you now!", "This is Darkstar One, prepare to die!" and our favourite "God is Merciful, but I am not".
Follow the landing lights to dock at the station. But don't take too long, or they'll close the door on you. Luckily your ship seems quite strong, so you'll just bounce off.
If you ever get bored of doing the story missions (and shouting at your enemies), there's an impressive amount of other things for you to try your hand at. At each "Trade Station" (which you'll find at the centre of every "cluster") you can take on a range of side quests ranging from simple package deliveries to bounty hunting missions, which will earn you money and increase your reputation throughout the galaxy. As well as the side quests, you can also talk to Cargo ships surrounding the Trade Station and offer them your services as an escort, protecting them from pirates as they journey from place to place. You can even become a Trader (or a smuggler) by importing things from Trade Station to Trade Station.
Darkstar One is a fine example of the Space-Simulator, a sadly neglected genre these days. And while it's pretty obvious it's based on a PC game (the menu's, for example, are archaic), it's easy enough to get into for the rest of us. It's also big enough to keep us occupied until the next space-simulator comes out, whenever that may be.
I could probably get the qualifications to be a real astronaut in that time… Unless you all buy this, and persuade them to make a sequel.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
