Monday, March 14, 2016

StarForge - 11/20 hours

I may have been to harsh on this game before. In the last few hours, I've really gotten into it. The turn-around point came when I suddenly remembered that I downloaded a game booster a couple months ago, to help me play Borderlands 2. And when I used it, it worked. My fps went from about 25 average, with dips to the single digits in busy areas, to about 40 average, with dips to about 25 in busy areas.

It was a change that breathed new life into the game. Places that were a chore to visit previously now suddenly opened up and became accessible. I could actually approach the crashed star ship, fight the monsters with my guns, and scavenge new blueprints from the wreckage.

StarForge is still not a great game. There's not enough diversity in you building blocks (it doesn't even have glass), and there needs to be more done to make the biomes feel more distinct (though there is some striking visual design in the various alien foliage), and exploring the crashed spaceship was a lot of fun . . . the first time.

If there were some system to put the kibosh on the proliferation of useless blueprints. If you could customize your vehicles. If monster-hunting was both riskier and more rewarding. Then StarForge could be a genuinely good game. As it is, it's mainly a way to waste some time. I really enjoyed scouting for the wide array of minerals necessary to build my first hoverbike. And riding that thing around has given me a welcome sensation of personal power. But now I'm stuck with what to do next. My most reasonable option is to design and build a structure without any windows, which doesn't really appeal to me all that much.

Still, losing myself in the game has been pretty easy. Which I guess goes to show that I'm a soft touch for survival crafting games. As long as it's even slightly functional, I'll find some way to amuse myself.

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