Needs a LOT of work – DARK - STAR Review

On the surface, Dark Star seems neat enough: it's a straightforward, simple, pretty, and fast-paced rail shooter with an interesting control scheme, and I did make an effort to try to like this game. Underneath, though, it suffers from some serious problems. My complaints: The way the levels, asteroids, and enemy projectiles curve along with the often-deceptively small movement range make it hard to eyeball where to dodge in a game that's all about dodging, especially when the bullet barrages are flying directly into and covering up the camera. This same issue also makes stars more difficult to collect than they should be, which is bad since they are required for ship upgrades. The random level generator is also flawed: the difficulty level can vary wildly from area to area, to the point that you can occasionally play a stage where no enemies appear at all. Personally, I also think that the level design grows repetitive quickly and provides little sense of progression, but that is more of a matter of opinion. And though this is also subjective, I find the slowdown combined with the loss of control when barrel rolling to be very annoying given that I can already move from end to end of the screen with long swipes. This is especially unpleasant because of how finicky the controls can be: if I try to repeatedly swipe the screen with one thumb to move the ship quickly and tap on an enemy to attack it, the game will register my actions as a double-tap and cause the ship to execute a barrel roll. All of these factors combine to make the already-bland mission system also uses for unlocking upgrades that the game uses to enhance longevity feel like tedious busy work. While Dark Star does have potential as a rail shooter, an ARC Squadron it is not, and it needs a great amount of tweaking before it can be called enjoyable.
Review by Wozzing on DARK - STAR.