Saturday, March 12, 2016

StarForge - 2/20 hours

I really wish I was playing Space Engineers. That's pretty much all you need to know about this game. You would rather be playing Space Engineers.

And just to test my theory, in case I was misremembering that other game out of a desperate desire to escape from StarForge into a world of fantasy, I fired up Space Engineers for a side-by-side comparison. It is indeed better than StarForge in almost every conceivable way (the exception is tree removal).

That said, I don't especially hate StarForge. If it weren't for the blog, I'd have no reason to ever play it, but given my current situation, I'm not cursing the heavens or anything like that. Okay, maybe I did a little when I tried tweaking the graphical settings and the game crashed again and again. And maybe I'm a little dismayed at all the clipping and textural pop-ins there are on "fast" graphics (seriously, whole trees would appear to shift position by about a quarter inch - it was very disorienting).

Yet the core of the game - wandering around, reducing random geological features to ground level in order to get the valuable minerals within, avoiding monsters, and (presumably) building stuff up - that all appears to be in order. I don't need a lot more than that to be entertained.

The real question becomes - exactly how tolerable is a diet version of a superior game? Probably not very, considering StarForge's ugly graphics, barren worlds, and sparse crafting options (apparently - it's hard to say, because the wiki and the in-game menus don't agree).

My plan, however, is not to think about it. I'll just roam over the wide-open spaces, search for mineral deposits, harvest mushrooms for meal-replacement shots, and try and stay alive as long as possible. Maybe I'll even build myself a fort or two.

And when it's all over, I'll happily uninstall this game and never think of it again.

No comments:

Post a Comment