Caltrops - Guess Who Fucked Up X-Com Now - Woah, shit! Did you know they remade Elite?

Forum Overview :: Guess Who Fucked Up X-Com Now

by Mischief Maker 03/28/2012, 1:06am PDT

Just made a leap-of-faith purchase on GOG of Darkstar One and was pleasantly surprised. This game quite clearly and deliberately is an update of Ian Bell and David Braben's Elite!

First a short mini-rant about the strange direction followups to Elite have taken over the years. For some dumb reason (probably the fact that Han Solo's day job was working as a smuggler when he wasn't busy doing all that exciting Star Warsing), latter day open space games are all about the economics at the expense of combat. The frigging X series is all about creating your own cargo shipping company with fleets of freighters hauling pooper scoopers across the galaxy to add to your miserly hoard. Eve online doesn't even have a flight model, instead abstracting the battles and emphasizing creating Ponzi schemes, IN SPACE! Have we all forgotten that cargo shipping was the crap work you did at first in Elite to get your ship up to snuff at which point your primary source of income came from blasting the shit out of pirates for the remainder of the game?

So yeah, the official modern X-Com and Syndicate are crappy FPSs, but every once in awhile I stumble on games that really are recreating the gameplay of these classic games of yesteryear but are given completely unrelated names you'd never connect with their inspirational games. Like who would have thought Space Rangers 2 had anything to do with Starflight or Star Control? At least they had the good sense to secure the title for their update of King's Bounty. Looking at the Darkstar One reviews they're pretty evenly split between enthusiastically positive reviews by people who "get" that it's a modernized version of Elite, and low 70 reviews by people comparing it unfavorably to (the pretty but overrated) Freelancer.

Freelancer is also this game's downfall because they added the option for mouse WASD control and refer to that in the tutorials, but their heart wasn't in it. Don't expect to be circle-strafing your enemies to death like you did in Freelancer, the lateral thrusters give you barely enough movement for more than minor course corrections. They didn't even bother to include the option to invert mouse controls. This game was made for flightstick control, and once you plug one in, it runs like a dream.

There's a plot, sadly, that serves to deliver the galaxy to you in tiny morsels at a time. That's a frowny. Otherwise, hooray for a modern version of Elite! Even the pushpin 3D radar is back. Recommended if you've got a flightstick.