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Reminiscent of Star Control and Privateer

  • Marrend
  • 06/05/2013 09:01 PM
  • 1076 views
Game Title: StarFront - Factions
Engine: Sphere
Status at review: In Progress/Demo

Background:
There's two reasons why I wanted to play this game. One is Media Madness Month. The other is the lack of games I've reviewed made by engines outside the RPG Maker "family".


Graphics:
The ship designs and planets look really nice. The nebulae that appears in the background from time-to-time keeps things from getting too repetitive. I didn't notice anything that obstructed exploration, though maps already had an appropriate sense of scale. The mini-map feature is a nice touch, but being able to see where all the planets are in a system would also be nice.


Audio:
As far as I can tell, there's only four songs here, and I only heard three of them in my various plays of the game. My favorite is the default music for exploring space, thought the in-combat music is decent as well.
Of the sound effects in this game, the explosion sound seemed familiar to me. It sounded like something right out of the Star Control series, though I could be wrong.


Playing the game:
If you've played Star Control, the controls should feel familiar. If not, the in-game message at the beginning of the game does a good job of detailing the controls. Even if you forget what does what, the F1 key re-displays the message.
The game involves picking up missions on a planet. The missions come in three flavors: mercenary, merchant, and escort. Players are allowed to engage ships without a mission, but I never noticed any benefit (monetary, or otherwise) of doing so.
With the game so centered on interacting with planets, it is rather sad that this is were the game falls apart. Outside of acquiring and completing quests, practically any other action on a planet causes the game screen to go completely black. When that happens, the only thing that seemed to do anything was pressing Escape, which returned me to Windows. This limits game sessions considerably, as missions take at least one hyperspace jump to complete, and one can only perform two jumps before needing to refuel.


General Observations:
There is a cargo limit for this game. This, of course, puts a limit on what kinds of merchant missions are possible. On the other hand, why not allow players to have cargo runs that do not involve being on missions? Planets have a shop option, so it seems possible that a commodity exchange can be implemented as well as ship upgrades. I guess it depends how much the developer wants to emulate Wing Commander - Privateer in this regard.
There's six ship models, and players can swap them on the fly for this demo. However, I didn't particularly notice any differences between them, functional or otherwise. My guess is that this will change as the game progresses.


Summary:
The game isn't particularly playable with this demo, but it teems with possibilities. I recommend keeping an eye on it's development!


BOTTOM LINE: N/A

Posts

Pages: 1
Thank you, it's been here for a while. I'm glad you took the time to try it. It was more of an atmospheric proof of concept. I still have thoughts of expanding it one of these days. :)
Pages: 1