Star Pirates Review

 As part of Sci-Fi month, many of the reviews I will be doing revolves around Sci-Fi Browser Games. The first game we look at is StarPirates.

The name alone alludes to the general setting and purpose of the game, but for those who find this too vague a description, I will briefly go over the in-game history, a longer version of which is available on the title page of the game.

The game centers around the Asteroid Belt and Jovian Planets as well as Mars. Regenabots were invented, making the world a utopia, but resuting in humanity overpopulating the planet. With a population equal to 4.5x the population on Earth today, many governments revert to despotism. To survive, humans are either to be mass-sterilized on Earth or head to the stars to form colonies. Needless to say, many form colonies amongst the planets and moons of the solar system. Regenabots follow, of course. In 8 years the asteroid belt is populated with little space-truck-stop satellites which have poor conditions but keep humans alive, and space mining becomes a big business. Then, two large asteroids destroy the Earth’s surface, and that’s where the game begins.

In this post apocalyptic universe, you take the role of the captain of a small sloop. The in-game tutorial is fairly encompassing, but you must either calculate yourself or learn from another the fine points of the game (i.e. what to research in what order, what equipment to buy, what to salvage foray for at what level, when to upgrade ships, etc.) I personally joined a fleet fairly quickly, so surely it cannot take long to get picked up. There are a few base resources which recharge at various rates. There’s Energy, used for combat, research, and a few other tasks, Research which is used at twice the rate of Energy in order to increase one’s Weapons, Engines, and Shields stats, as well as Fuel, used for salvage forays, asteroid belt exploring, and moving between major stations. Now, their rates vary a bit, for example Energy and Research being the same recharge rate and Fuel being quite a lot slower than that, but it’s sort of a downer in that the rates are different and constantly replenishing (rates are measured by amount per minute, two minutes, in some cases, five minutes.) It forces one to check rather frequently to the game so they don’t miss that much resources. In addition, one can scavenge for debris to regularly earn a few thousand cargo (the monetary unit) and possibly a piece of equipment (worth anywhere from 3,000 to 30,000,000 cargo) once per hour and play the slot machines (earning about 3,500 cargo on average at low levels) once per day.

StarPirates offers a system of buying points with real life money, starting with 350 for $3.00 and going up from there, as well as a system of buying a number of perks with buying Notorious status. This leads to another annoying problem as one of the perks of being notorious is that when selling items on the open marketplace, all proceeds go straight to the in-game version of a bank. Without this status, however, it goes straight to one’s money, and when one is attacked, they lose 10% of that in addition to death. There is a solution around this (be dead before selling, so you can’t lose any of the proceeds while dead) but still, this is quite a big problem as it can take a long time to sell a particular item, and while the game offers one to sell the item to the game, in the most expensive cases, they have to sell for points, which must be sold in a similar matter to items and making one risking money still.

The combat system works efficiently and simply and can be a strength to the game. Weapons stat increases damage, shields stat reduces damage done to a ship, and engines stat does two things: Engines stat increases hull points temporarily based on one’s advantage over their enemies’ engines stat, and increases chance of a surprise attack (dealing a lot of damage). While the stats may also do different things which are kept behind the scenes, the secrecy is quite minimized. Also are the Officers, which give additional bonuses to ships in exchange for 10% of their gold and experience (the latter of which is used to help level up the officer to give better bonuses).

The game overall, is very satisfying. It has a few minor flaws and a necesity for quick refresh. It even has a mobile interface, which I personally, find to work well on the phones I’ve tried it on.

Pros:

Mobile Interface Available

Inexplicably fun to play

Simple combat system

Cons:

Economy abuse with the point system is possible

A handful of major annoyances/quirks

Necesity for constant refresh

Altogether, StarPirates recieves a 7.0/10.

Register to play StarPirates here.

 by Clotifoth