Interstellaria Review

That is, until somebody has the poor judgement to get all up in your space-grille. In contrast to combat on the ground, which amounts to little more than bumping your underpaid crew into extraterrestrial wildlife until the latter explodes into coins, Interstellaria’s space combat is probably its freshest feature. In a nutshell, it plays a bit like a slowed-down mouse-driven shmup: you power up weapons, get everybody glued to their respective screens, then plot a rapidly-changing course in an attempt to dodge the incoming hailstorm of bullets, shells, energy spheres and asteroids. Novel idea, potentially very hectic as the stakes rise, but merely kind of okay-ish in practice. For a game about obsessively controlling every tiny detail of your fleet, there’s a lot of fine control missing from Interstellaria’s battles: you can’t set weapons to target different enemies, you can’t choose which ones receive power (except by changing their slots entirely through your ship design screen) and after watching my chief tactical officer miss for the hundredth time because he never played Tribes and doesn’t understand how to lead his shots, I just want to slap him away from the controls and do it myself.

Or maybe he’s actually a crack shot, and he’s just been working with the same controls that I have this whole time. Interstellaria’s interface isn’t terrible, but it does feel old; the kind of gunmetal-grey, screen-covering, largely mouse-driven, inefficient UI that would feel right at home in a late MS-DOS game like System Shock, which I’m guessing was intentional.While wrestling with the UI elements isn’t much of a pain in itself, the ratio of faffing about with windows to actually getting things done is well into the red zone. I can’t just stroll into a store, point out a particle cannon and tell the game which ship to bolt it to; I have to buy it, get everybody on-board, initiate take-off, open up my inventory, move it from my “away” cargo hold to my regular cargo hold - put your hand down, I don’t know what that physically entails either - close the inventory, open up the fleet management window, click on the right ship, scroll through the cargo hold, then drag it onto the right slot. And yet, despite my time being repeatedly wasted, I can’t help wondering if the game would have the same soul if all this was painless. For a game primarily about upper management, it’s strangely appropriate that your biggest adversary is a slightly-obtuse tangle of bureaucratic forms, menus and windows. You could streamline it, sure, but you’d only be cheating me out of gameplay. Like, where does that conclude? A big button in the middle of the screen that you just press to make everything right?

I was being flippant when I wrote ‘biggest adversary’ there, but on reflection it’s a lot closer to the truth than I’d like. Interstellaria feels like the kind of game that would really benefit from being tough as nails, but the only nails it can offer up are made from soggy tissue paper and discarded ice-cream wrappers. Partially this is down to the game’s predilection for putting safety nets everywhere: there’s no enemy on the ground, however imposing, that can’t be defeated by the dishonourable strategy of getting your crew to slowly chip away at their health, run back to the ship’s medical vats for a free heal and ammo refill, jump back into the fray, and repeat as necessary. There’s no damage to your ship that can’t be fixed by parking on the side of the intergalactic highway and getting your engineer to tinker with his lathe for a couple of minutes. Don’t feel like fighting that incoming hostile ship just yet? Cut power to the engines and the whole universe will stop to wait for you. Even when the game finally grows some teeth, it’s too little, too late: by the time enemy ships were heavily armed enough to prevent me from just effortlessly weaving around their attacks, I was already the proud owner of a cruiser strong enough to just plough right through anything short of a planetoid. The only way to really fail is through gross negligence, and even then, falling asleep at the captain’s chair is rarely punished by more than a couple of minutes’ setback.This is the kind of game where you don’t buy better equipment to give yourself a better chance of survival; you do it to make the tedious bits more bearable.

But what really shoots down Interstellaria, more than anything else, is that its universe is about as expansive, deep, and interesting to explore as a set of office cubicles. You can easily joyride from one side of the star-map to the other in a few minutes, and while the game certainly packs a lot of planets into that expanse, most of them just can’t be landed on at all, or offer nothing more than the opportunity to pick more bloody flowers. The whole game feels like a case of getting all dressed up with nowhere to go: you build up a fleet, build up a crew, get everybody prepped for their first day voyaging into the unknown void, and then just sort of scoot back and forth around the galactic neighbourhood, blasting anybody who challenges you into smithereens while chasing plot events with no purpose besides delaying the ending for another few minutes. All that micromanagement I was gushing over so breathlessly on the last page is still great, but it’s all done for its own sake. If you just want to be handed the spacefaring equivalent of a model train set and a lifetime supply of construction glue then Interstellaria can provide, but don’t blame me if the first trip around the kitchen table doesn’t feel like much of an adventure.