I’d expect sci-fi to be a popular setting for games because it requires even less thought than fantasy you can basically do a hundred iterations of “Modern day thing X, but in the FUTURE” and then call it a day. Even though the last year has seen an extraordinary number of these titles released – I can probably count at least five off the top of my head – only one of them has had any staying power to my mind, and Endless Space is a game with many of its own problems. Some of them have had a limited amount of impact but are ultimately fading away into obscurity (Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire).
Some of them have been badly made buggy messes (Sword of the Stars 2, for example). If you cast your eye back over the last decade or so of strategy titles, you might notice that the 4X genre is littered with the corpses of dead and dying space-based empire building games.
I sometimes wonder if the bored gaming journalist/PR bod who came up with it ever regrets this most enduring of their contributions to gaming culture. Genre labels are necessary the term 4X, however, is spectacularly awful, standing as it does for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. Should it ever get lonely, you can always hit up other people with which you're sharing Starbase's world.Note before we start: “4X” is an acronym invented by a moron for the same reason that the term “FPS” was inserted into the general gaming lexicon: because calling games “Doom clones” and “Civ-alikes” is seen as demeaning to the ones that might actually be trying to iterate and develop a genre. Players can also participate in the conflict between the Empire and the Kingdom which can lead to some outright massive space-to-ground battles, or simply explore the universe, taking in its various sights. If building isn't quite your thing, you can take up mining asteroids, hauling cargo or trading valuables with massive, player-created space stations. Players seeking more complexity can try their hand at using the in-game programming chips that let them enable automation of ships. As an example, when building ships, you get to place every bolt holding down their external plates yourself. Starbase's smallest building unit is a bolt and the title emphasizes creative freedom when it comes to player-created structures, letting you decide how you want to build your ship or space station. A thruster propellant leak can cause ships to stall but if the leaking substance is corrosive, you can easily end up with a newfound hole that changes the structural integrity of your ship for the worse. Similarly, internal damage will affect ships differently. Minor ones may leave you without a few exterior plates fly like a maniac, and the moment you faceplant into a solid structure, your ship will be ripped apart. Starbase's physics allow collisions to apply different levels of damage to ships based on the speed at which they travel. Starbase's world is fully persistent, meaning that every building, spaceship and station will end up leaving its mark, at least until someone blows it up.īuilt on Frozenbyte's proprietary engine, the title relies on hybrid voxel/vertex-based gameplay to fuel its fully destructible environment and deep simulation.
Its focus is quite broad, encompassing "building and designing spaceships and stations, exploration, resource gathering, crafting, trading, and combat", as developer Frozenbyte puts it. As far as gameplay goes, Starbase is quite an ambitious title.
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