![]() ![]() I had no weapons, I found pretty much no hostile players, and I wouldn’t like it anyway. The economy system is neat: farm all the ores, sell them off quickly, or at the auction house where you can earn more credits. Definitely not the kind of game you want to be playing if you have an absolute lack of patience and time. ![]() Space travel is as expected - long periods of traveling in your ship with nothing much happening for thousands of kilometers. Most of which, unfortunately, I was not quite able to test. The basic fundamentals of an MMO are there - space travel, economy system, acquiring materials, even combat. It is kind of a shame that Starbase is so inaccessible to newbies because otherwise the concept is excellent. Other players also report a plethora of ship-building issues, which I didn’t experience because I can’t get enough credits to build my own ship!) and I sometimes wonder if the struggle is genuinely worth it. Add to this what appears to be bugs of varying degrees (I, for one, am unable to get shop terminals, of all things, to appear, and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing wrong or how even to buy something. This is not conveyed to you via the tutorials in-game, and it’s disheartening to make a lot of wasted trips to the asteroid belt, find nothing (because of the aforementioned asteroid location issues), then have to fly back to the station before you run out of fuel. Fuel rods have to be obtained by some rather convoluted method and then replaced manually into your ship by yet another complicated method. Go out and struggle through the microscopic dots on your screen to hopefully find the asteroid you need, and pray it isn’t the wrong type of ore.Ī lot of the stuff that you need to learn to get around the game is all based on external resources, like the Starbase wiki, which increases my frustration with the user-friendliness even further. Oh, you didn’t get it during your first mining trip? Too bad. When that’s all said and done, the next objective suddenly requires you to have amassed two specific types of ore. You have to locate asteroids in the asteroid belt to mine, but because the depth perception in this game is pretty awful and there are no helpful indicators to show how far away is the nearest asteroid finding asteroids to mine proved to be an unreasonable chore. An early tutorial mission required mining a bunch of material, and it was quite possibly one of the most frustrating experiences I had in this game or any other game for that matter. This is further compounded by the tutorials (and the game in general) not being as helpful as they could possibly be. I’ve not played a game of this scale before, I will admit, so speaking from a newbie-oriented experience, it is incredibly daunting to learn everything, up to the point where I have to take screenshots, so I don’t forget the keybinds. The first thing you notice is there are many systems in the game, from building to dismantling ships, mining, and piloting ships. The nature of this game is quite a culture shock to anyone that has played their past offerings. Fans of previous Frozenbyte games, unfortunately, will likely find this incredibly jarring to play. You load the game up, pick an origin point out of a pre-selected set, and then spawn into a base as a robot with a series of tutorials. Of course, one must be mindful of if the servers go down for maintenance. I’m happy to say this situation is now much better a few weeks after launch, it is easy to fire up the game and jump into a server. After playing it for a while, I firmly believe it, oh dear.Īt launch, the servers were incredibly unstable. It is a space MMO with a combination of a voxel/vertex-based aesthetic that Frozenbyte fully stresses is in alpha state at the time of review. Starbase, undoubtedly, is Frozenbyte’s most ambitious project thus far, with development having started around 2014, before an announcement in 2019, and then Early Access release at the end of July 2021. None have been anywhere near the scale of this offering, however. Indie stalwart Frozenbyte has certainly been around for quite a while, with the general scope of their releases ranging from single-player experiences (Shadowgrounds, Shadwen, Has-Been Heroes) to games that have a potential multiplayer element to it (Trine series, Nine Parchments, Boreal Blade).
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