![]() ![]() ![]() My first attempt lasted less than an hour before I was rushed and destroyed by an enemy race, and my second didn’t fare much better. The manual gives a basic overview but getting dumped into something of this complexity with nothing more than a couple of tutorial videos and some text help topics to back you up can be very daunting. There is also currently no multiplayer functionality so it is just you versus the AI, meaning that it takes control of all opposing races and creates ‘personas’ for each of them, meaning that each play-through should vary and tactics against a certain race may not succeed the next time. There is also an option to select the play mode but at the time of writing Sandbox is the only option. Options for size of galaxy (and density of planets), number of opponents and difficulty are all present to allow you an experience that’s streamlined for ability level and time available. If there is one aspect of StarDrive that will consistently show throughout it is the level of customisation Zero Sum Games went all out to provide customisation options far beyond anything I’ve previously encountered in other 4X titles, such as Sins of a Solar Empire.įrom the same launch menu as your starting race attributes you can also alter the rest of the game’s parameters. You can rename your Race, Empire and Homeworld too before you even set foot inside the actual meat of the experience. Blindness – for instance – will weaken your hit rate with projectile weapons but free up three points to use elsewhere. Want to play as human but can’t be bothered with worrying about feeding your populace? No problem, select the cybernetic trait and all of your food woes go away! You have a pool of eight points to select various traits (each valued between one to four points) and you can gain more points by selecting negative traits too. Ultimately though, the choice of race is pretty much redundant (for the player) as you can customise your race completely via the traits system. Then you have the GladOS-like Opteris, the Cthulhu-like Rayleh and many more. The Space Bears, or Kulrathi, are obviously a slight nod to the Space Cats of Wing Commander, or the Kilrathi as I knew them. You are able to select a race from a fairly forgettable list that covers the usual stuff: Humans – check, Robots – check, Insect Race – check, Space Bears – check… wait, what? If you’ve heard anything about StarDrive at all then it is likely the inclusion of Space Bears, as well as Space Owls and Space Wolves (not the Warhammer 40K variety by the way) but they didn’t seem to garner the same level of excitement.Įach race has a description, most of which is a copy and paste job with many races sharing the same ‘unremarkable diets’ sentence, but the portraits are varied and fun to view with definite nods to various sci-fi and fantasy inspirations. StarDrive has no storyline, no plot, or major characters – but this isn’t unusual for the 4X strategy genre where you command an entire race that should eventually span the galaxies. Being primarily a console gamer I’m still getting my head around buying a potentially unfinished product with no real guarantee it’ll be made better, but then I’m sure those cynical few amongst you will point out that current generation console games are usually rushed with day one patches fair point, but usually at least all of the features are in place… I’d recently returned to modern PC gaming after my ancient rig (which had been on borrowed time for a while) finally gave up on me, thus providing an excuse to spend money that I don’t have – praise be for overdrafts, am I right?!Īfter doing a little reading around whilst waiting for delivery it became apparent that this had been in beta for a while and, like many recent ‘KickStarter’ funded games on the PC, seems to be one that is released in a ‘mostly finished state’ but with more developments added as time goes on. When a boxed copy of StarDrive unexpectedly arrived at GLHQ I was more than happy to barge fellow writers aside to sink my teeth into a 4X space strategy title.
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