BETWEEN THE STARS Preview for Steam

Between the Stars by developer Isolated Games is a game that holds a large amount of promise to it. It isn’t about what they’re claiming to put in the game that gives it this potential, but it’s what’s already in the demo that makes it so promising. Even though it isn’t much more than a demo right now, with some proper polish I have no doubt that this game will be great. It wouldn’t surprise me if it gained a bit of a cult following after its full release. But I’m not talking about the game of the future, I’m talking about the game right now, so here’s how it is:

Mechanics

In my mind, the mechanics of Between the Stars is what really sets it apart. The mechanics of it aren’t just good, but they’re in their own way stylistic. The controls are complex, to the point where you need the full keyboard to fully utilize your ship. At any moment, you have hyper drives and boosters and fine ship positioning controls and power management and low speed docking thrusters and several different weapon hotkeys, and it sounds overwhelming, but it’s really well done. The power management system is especially cool because you can change where the ships energy is routed within seconds. If you’re in a broadside battle, you might not need that much energy in the speed section, so you can instead divert it to weapons and shield. Trying to get away from a group of enemy ships, empty out weapon and shield energy and put it all in speed.

            While the piloting may be complex, the controls are fairly intuitive, and frankly, it doesn’t make too much sense to pilot such complex spaceships with only four keys and a mouse click anyway. All these buttons are necessary. And these are just the piloting mechanics, there’s also significant portions of the game that include, ship management, crew management, buying, selling, scrapping, creating, and text adventure. At first, I was a bit weary on the text adventure aspect of the game, and I still think it needs some polish, but it feeds in nicely with the style they’ve been creating with their mechanics. The text adventure is decent though, and you have multiple branches to choose from, and sometimes skill checks every now and then.

I’ve been talking a lot about the style of the mechanics of Between the Stars without actually saying what it means. What I mean about this style they are creating with their controls and shop layouts and text adventures and so on is that they are making a game with old school handles. While it is a modern game, and the graphics will reflect that, it is a modern game that pays homage to the style of older games. The ship commands reflect that with their level of complexity, and the other parts show it as well. One thing that really brought me to this idea was the skill checks, when a skill check for charisma popped up, the game didn’t tell me “you have seven charisma so you will pass the skill check,” it instead rolled a dice. It was a little thing but it reminded me a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, and then I began to notice the other old school choices within the game. From the talking heads to the space-station hubs where you buy and sell and pick up quests, I started to realize that these core mechanics weren’t just picked because they looked cool and felt good to play, but because they worked towards a theme. And although there are modern games with one or two of these features, like the store hub or the talking heads, I’d argue that it’s the combination of all these features that creates a game with such a classic style. And this is all just from the mechanics of the game, I haven’t even started to talk about the story…

Story

            And I haven’t talked about the story that much because it wasn’t that interesting to me. It’s a demo right now, so I expected the story to not be huge. It was decent but I wasn’t very engaged. It was fun enough doing the quests though, and the graphics are amazing.

Overall

            At the moment, this game is a lot like BeamNG. Not because this game is a really cool car and physics simulator, but because this game has amazing mechanics while the story/quests are lacking. Between the Stars is mechanically excellent, and I’m excited to see how the developers build  up the rest of the game.

Check Out the Between the Stars Steam Early Access Trailer:

Between the Stars releases for PC via Steam Early Access tomorrow, May 28, 2019.