SCORE:
Graphics: 8
Sound: 7
Gameplay: 7
Overall: 7.5
Pros: Easy to play, difficult to master with a nice balance of ship customisation.
Cons: Limited maps depending on rank.
We’ve lately had an in-depth look at Star Conflict, another free-to-play title from Gaijin Entertainment, more widely known for the development of War Thunder. However, instead of fighting in a World War II setting onboard of various planes, players will take a seat in a huge array of star ship that can be customised in order to cruise across the galaxy and battle for one of 3 major ruling factions. This free-to-play MMO also offers some membership options as well as purchases of the in-game premium currency which grants access to a number of new ships, mods, features and other perks and boosts.
Boasting pretty rich and detailed graphics, Star Conflict unsurprisingly is a client-based shooter MMO, the system requirements of which aren’t too high as to pose any problems for more mid-level specs users. Upon entering the game, we played through 3 different tutorial missions which introduced us to the basics of ship movement as well as to how to attack and destroy enemy ships, the basics of capturing sector points before ultimately thrusting us into a mock battle against some AI bots.
Our first impression was that the controls were actually surprisingly fluid and easy to pick up; the mouse is used for directing the ship (while the cursor will also determine the direction of your weapons’ fire), W and S to thrust and brake, A and D to strafe and Q and E to roll. It’s easy to imagine how acrobatic dogfights could be with high-level players capable of completely nastering more nimble ships. Outside of the tutorial, we unfortunately had to realise that our starting ship was a little bit slow on the uptake and the thrusters didn’t last that long before leaving us high and dry.
The two primary focuses seem to be the destruction of enemies and the capture of points. Regardless of the game mode you play, you have to stay in the near vicinity in order to control and capture a point while a timer ticks down at the end of which the point switches over to your team; however, at any point you are taking damage, the timer will stop ticking.
The matches focus on team-based combat and are broken down into several rounds with a time limit. Even when playing at an all-time (as we found out), any missing team-mates in your team will thankfully be replaced by bots automatically, which do a pretty decent job in battle, particularly during the initial levels and when compared to newbies like us. Some of the game modes in our level range were locked until you gain ownership of a ship of at least level 4, 7 and 10 respectively, which meant that there were only two games we initially were allowed to play: Team Battle and Domination.
Team Battle was the typical Team Deathmatch, although some peculiar instructions tasked us with being the first to reduce the enemy team’s resources. We therefore were initially looking around for some points we were obviously supposed to take out, before realising that this actually meant to destroy the other team’s ships. Right after the tutorial, it was pretty obvious that our ship had been downgraded. However, we hadn’t pimped out our ship with the credits we’d been rewarded with for completing the tutorial, which we made up for by ranking up our ship and upgrading our weapons before heading into the second match. To do so, the different available currencies give access to a wide variety of different modules, paint decals as well as new ships that players can unlock and customise.
Domination was about capturing points with a team consisting of 3 players as well as 4 AI bots on the same maps we’d played in the tutorial, which didn’t provide us with any particular advantage. However, we got off to a ridiculously great start as our team managed to take all 3 capture points on the map straight away and then defended those well enough to force the enemy team to divide their forces in order to try and regain control. They weren’t successful in their task and so we won one of the quickest games ever and could even pick up 2 personal trophies from the battle: one for being the first player to capture a beacon and another for killing a player in a ship ranked 3 levels higher!
Our first impressions are that Star Conflict holds up well and is definitely fun and easy to jump into. However, it’s hard to predict for how long it would keep us engaged, although there thankfully are PVE missions available as well as a clan/ Corporation battle system that we imagine would be pretty fun to be involved in with fellow clan mates.
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