Last year we dove into the early access for Into the Stars. It is an ambitious game from developer Fugitive Games that offers up a bit of everything from action to adventure with a dash of strategy to bring it all together. It was a bit rough around the edges the first go, as everything generally is in early access, but the final version certainly pushed some gameplay items forward a bit and made this game into something very special.
Let’s get right into it.
First and foremost, the game is still gorgeous since its early access days, though some elements have been added (minor ones) to increase the visual taste of the experience. For example, you can see cloud movement on the planets now, which either I didn’t see the first time around or were added (I’m sure it was the latter). Regardless, the Unreal Engine 4 lays the ground work for the visuals and courses through the veins of Into the Stars. The first time you see a fiery sun in all its glory, you’ll know what the game is made of visually. The details, the depth of the environments, they are all some of the strongest aspects of the game. In short, it’s a very pretty game to sit and stare at, good folks.
In addition, traveling through space is a wonderful experience, as the environment, as you would expect from space, is deep and ever expanding. You can control the ship in the game on an XYZ axis, which means you can pivot/tilt and roam any direction you would like. If you see a planet from far away, you can tilt the ship, punch the thrusters to max and move to it. If you want to fly into the environment of a planet with a slight tilt of the ship, then you can twist the ship around and do so. There is an incredible amount of flexibility and freedom when it comes to movement within the environment that Fugitive Games has built. It feels like a huge sandbox of fun that has massive exploration options readily available. If they built a flying game that solely involved exploring planets (no one has ever done that, right?), then I would eat it up if it worked like Into the Stars.
Don’t stare too long at the visuals, though, as the gameplay will immediately remind you of your life choices and what exactly is at stake.
Traveling through space comes at a cost, as your need to gather resources along the way to keep moving forward is nothing short of a ‘must’. The faster you go in the game, the more resources you consume. To alleviate your needs you can search for abandoned or wrecked ships in space, which carry various items of interest, or you can mine surrounding planets in the game. You can send a probe to mine, you can mine the planet for resources via a drill with two crew members controlling it or you can send a group of crew members to explore the surface and gather resources (there is also a trade option, though far less exciting).
The unmanned probe will bring back certain elements randomly, which is fine. It’s a safe bet that doesn’t put crew members at risk. It gathers up the elements and you can pick and choose how many you want back, with a limitation on how much ‘total’ you can store before doing another mining run. Again, it’s a safe bet when not wanting to risk crew lives.
The mining option is still my favorite left over from early access. The game sends a pair of crew members to the surface to mine whatever planet you’re hovering over. The game switches from a 3D experience to 2D, where you control a yellow drill that goes through labeled elements in the ground, while trying to avoid unbreakable rocks that would destroy the drill. It’s a small addictive rush that offers up a change in the game, if not only briefly.
The final way to obtain resources is to handpick a crew to visit the surface of whatever planet you’re on. The crew that comes with you in Into the Stars is randomly generated and each has their own set of attributes that will either result in a huge amount of success or extreme failure in mining. Mining plays a huge role in the gameplay, so picking and choosing the correct crew with the right attributes is vital.
Speaking of vital, and outside of mining, Into the Stars has a tinge of Oregon Trail in the gameplay, especially when it comes to random events happening. For example, along the way the game will throw certain things at you, maybe a crew member gets hurt or sick or dies. Your character will have to make decisions to help out and to improve said situations on the fly. That might mean sending a crew member to the sick bay or randomly discovering a cure for a disease that is spreading on the ship. Regardless, all the elements you gathered in the mining process are important to avoid these random occurrences from getting out of control. The world is certainly against you in this game, which keeps the strategy going from the start. In addition to worrying about survival, you must also worry about potential attacks from the Skorn empire (and evil alien species that hates you — and is the reason you are in deep space) and trying to figure out how to obtain resources from planets.
What impresses me about Into the Stars is that it has a bit of everything. You get a heavy dose of strategy mixed with a Wing Commander-esque backbone (flying the ship), as well as a hint of Oregon Trail, as I mentioned above, that brings enough random situations to keep the game interesting for hours. That’s a big mix of different genres that require a lot of you, and that’s not a bad thing.
Having said all this, one big complaint I have with the game is the lack of control direction and the user interface. I must have spent at least 5-10 minutes trying to figure out how to switch between the mining/crew portion of the ship to the flying of the ship. In the end, it was a simple esc-esc-esc and then pop the camera back to the outside of the ship, but there wasn’t much visual cue to go along with it. Now, you could blame that on the dimwit reviewer (I would) or Fugitive simply needs to put more visuals cues in the UI to let one know how to navigate around it. Regardless, I felt stuck in the game and that’s something no game should make any gamer feel.
Anyway, that complaint aside, Into the Stars is the monster that Frankenstein should have put together. It’s a proper mix of everything you would want in a space adventure and a bit more than you might have expected. It’s not perfect by any means, but Fugitive Games does enough to make this one of the more interesting space adventures you might encounter in 2016.
Onto the summary!
