Starport Delta is an indie game released for PC on Steam by the two devs at Cloudfire Studios. It is a simple space-simulation/strategy title. The premise is for the player to serve as a “station commander” being sent to different space stations with directions to reorganize and optimize their performance for a space-faring empire’s needs. How does it play and is it a worthwhile experience? Well, sort of. Starport Delta features a pretty robust concept and central gameplay design, but it lacks in content and refinement for its mechanics. With that in mind, here is a breakdown of what works and doesn’t in the game, as well as final suggestions and the takeaway of the experience.
Pros:
• Starport Delta offers a basic tutorial through a few different simulated missions to help new players get accustomed to the game. Nothing too exceptional here, but it is a good feature.
• On top of a campaign mode, the game offers three different sandbox experiences of varying difficulty. Zen sandbox removes events such as raids or meteor showers and the player has immediate access to all structures. As a result, players can focus on constructing the space station of their dreams. Easy sandbox is the logical step-up, allowing for different events and maintaining the objective of building a station and unlocking the next structures to further its construction. Hard sandbox simply takes easy mode and cranks up the difficulty by increasing the occurrence of the different possible events.
• An additional bit of content the game offers is through the mode “Challenges”. The premise is that the AI who runs the player through the original tutorial missions now has more difficult simulations to tackle. These trials have much higher objectives, such as the first challenge requiring the player to obtain 1,000,000 space bucks and 9,000 building materials.
• A leaderboard is also available for competitive scoring. As a player builds their station and completes objects their overall score will increase, which can then be submitted to the public leaderboard (but only on the first session as saving and loading an instance removes eligibility from the leaderboard).
• Visuals are not incredibly impressive, but they are simple and serviceable especially for an indie game. The buildings are bright and vibrant with clear color designations, as are the grid icons that represent their areas of effect.
• The developers appear to be listening to customer feedback and are continuing to update the game. Therefore, potential issues are still capable to be fixed based on reviews and feedback.
Cons:
• The campaign feels more like an extended tutorial, often slow and clunky. The beginning missions feel like an extremely slow burn without anything to offer except a basic explanation of different game mechanics. Later missions feature events such as meteor showers or raids by pirates, the issue with these stems from the fact they are far too frequent. It feels as if just a minute or two after having held off one of these events the next one will arrive just to keep slowing progress. Even after driving them off, the wreckage of their ships still lingers, and those particles of fallen enemies prevent building on the corresponding tiles. Even after an extended period, these parts do not disappear, so the only way to get rid of them is the expensive repair station.
• There are a few different events called “security scans” which will frequently be offered to the player for completion. These are objectives such as removing radiation from the power supply, removing alien stowaways from the station’s populace, or even handling smuggling rings that pop up in mining depots. These situations can be handled by either sparing the problem or by jettisoning them out of the airlock. Taking care of these issues in either way will earn the player money and the airlock option rewards more money from the Empire. However, the risk comes from the lowering of the station’s population for that time and the possibility of luring a massive space worm that will cause incredible destruction to the station. These activities become tedious very quickly and they are more frustrating to deal with in a successful station with numerous buildings. Trying to locate and solve an issue in the dense web of structures gets annoying very quickly, even when it seems that the objects only ever spawn in the first or second rows. Also, stowaways and developers are colored in green meanwhile a missing grandfather matches the color of typical civilians and is barely distinguishable in outline.
• The game features voice acting for its characters, however, there is at least one case where the voice of a character could very well be offensive. During one of the campaign missions, the player is tasked with fixing a very outdated space station that is overseen by an older man of Asian descent. The voice for this character entirely feels like it is stereotyped, even sounding as if it’s a natural English speaker attempting to sound like an Asian speaking heavily accented English and being unwilling to change their old ways for new and more efficient ones. I do not believe any offense was intended, it simply feels like a bad judgment call or oversight.
Suggestions to the developers:
• A more consistent color and design scheme among the security scans, as well as possible indicators for the general region where the issue is taking place, may be beneficial.
• Reworking the role of the Asian character in the campaign.
• Adding a time manipulation feature, allowing players to speed up during dull periods of the game when resources are lacking, or they are waiting on something specific.
• Allow debris from pirate ships to decay after a period so they do not clutter the building grid around a spaceship.
• Implement a cooldown period between meteor showers and pirate raids, perhaps incremental in some way that increases the cooldown’s length if the player has lost buildings or if the events have occurred multiple times in a short period.
• Adding a feature that allows for clicking and dragging a cursor over an area to select multiple buildings for repair would help make integrity management for the station much less tedious.
Overall, Starport Delta is a relatively solid indie title from the developers at Cloudfire Studios. It is simple in design and small in scope as it stands. The game is enjoyable and can be relaxing over short sessions but doesn’t hold interest and lacks a significant amount of content. However, with the developers listening to reviews and user feedback, there is hope it will be added to and improved over time. If the game continues to receive updates over time, it could very well turn into a fun title deserving of its price tag.
