Starway fleet is a space flightin’ fightin’ game where you play as a fighter pilot in the Starway Fleet during its campaign against the enemy, the Toorgaen.
Combat is meaty and heavy, and, while the mouse and keyboard controls are a bit janky and shaky, my experience with using a HOTAS joystick gave me a lot of control over my fighter.
Your fighter ship has all the standard movement controls, up down, left right, forward-back and all your rotational stuff is all there. Sadly, unlike similar games such as Astrokill you don’t really have momentum, turning off your engines or turning around will just cause you to either slow down or start speeding up in the opposite direction. If you do wish to fly around in weird and spectacular ways though, you can map buttons to switch a specific thruster set’s direction the other way, if you have a 0-100% thrust axis, like a joystick throttle or such. Finally you have an afterburner to get out of a situation quickly or to escape from enemy missiles.
Speaking of missiles, your ship is outfitted with heat seeking missiles, proton torpedos, 3 different types of lasers and a 20mm cannon. The missiles and torpedos are attached to your secondary weapons, with the lasers and cannon being your primary weapons. Your secondary weapons are simple enough, missiles can be locked onto enemies and will track them, with a choice of either more powerful torpedoes or weaker but still damaging missiles.
Your laser cannons have three modes, a four shot mode, a two shot mode and a single shot mode, which balance out the number of shots with the number of shots you can fire before overloading the cannons. This is a genuinely cool mechanic, making you choose between a few powerful and damaging shots, or firing a lot of shots with less punch.
In addition to moving your ship around all over the place and controlling the various weapons on the ship, you are in charge of managing your power levels, shunting it around to shields, engine and weapons systems. While this is a very common mechanic, and has been done in several games before, it’s always nice to have this control over your ship, shunting power into your weapons to gain a better rate of fire, or your engines to gain a speed boost.
Shields are fairly self-explanatory, one shield covering the aft portion of your ship and another covering the bow section, these prevent damage from reaching your hull. Your main worry of incoming damage is enemy missiles, as long as you keep moving around, faster than the enemy bullets. Your ship is equipped with flares that can help distract locked on enemy missiles, although they don’t always work, making it very worrying every time you use one, balancing out the need for a non blown up ship and keeping your flares for future blowing-up-your-ship situations.
Starway Fleet‘s campaign is fair enough, with a nice run of missions, a survival mode where you fight against increasing waves of enemy fighters, and a custom mode where you can pick and choose various enemy ships to fight against, either against other fighters or enemy capital ships for a harder nut to crack. Each mode can be played as a rookie, an elite player or as a veteran, giving a wide range of players a hardy opponent.
My gripes are small and simple. Pitch and roll (which way you’re going) seem very granulated and it’s very hard to accurately position yourself over a far away target, always going from one side to the other, never able to land your reticle directly on them. While this isn’t ‘terrible’, it detracts from the enjoyment of Starway Fleet and can be very frustrating at times, though that does not change the fact that overall, ’tis a good game.
Starway Fleet is a fun space combat simulator, with satisfying combat and enjoyable flying. While it’s still in development, it looks and plays great, has VR support if you really want to experience space combat for real and what seems like a good team behind it.
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