It’s been quite a while since I blogged, but I wanted to kick things off with a post about a new game that I got from a friend – StarDrive. This one has been on my steam wishlist for a while, but I’ve mostly been watching to see how it develops. However, I’m glad someone picked it up for me, because otherwise I might have missed out. Below is my impression learning the game, and my thoughts from 3 hours in.

Usually, in booting up a new game, I’m a tutorial guy. I like the experience of playing the game in “don’t kill me” mode so that I can figure out controls and get the gist of what the game is all about. The tutorial in StarDrive however does not deliver. I spent a few minutes poking at the static images and text (enough to determine that this was a game that would take place in space, have planets, and space ships), and decided that I should just jump in. Oh, good, the game has an “easy” difficulty, maybe I can give that a go…

During my first three hour play session, I tackled the game similarly to how I would tackle a game of Sins of a Solar Empire: Colonize all the nearby planets that look viable until I become space constrained. This worked reasonably well early on, but about half-way through this, I realized I wasn’t becoming space constrained, and instead found myself spread a bit too thin. I was able to recover, mostly because my opponents didn’t seem interested in bombing all of my planets, so I started building the one fleet.

My first few fleets were destroyed by NPC ships (I chose weak fighters), but I got the hang of it without wasting too much. I also found that targeting enemy ships was really hard without pausing the game, but after a while I got into a pattern of “pause, fleet attack target, unpause” that actually flowed rather well. Many other battles followed, which eventually ended in my domination of the galaxy.

During my first game, I learned everything the hard way: espionage, diplomacy, spending more money than I had, over extending myself, refueling/rearming, and losing lots of ships to a better prepared foe, but overall this was a lot of fun. I expect I’ll be playing it for a while yet, as the single-player fleet combat, ship designing, espionage, and race design were all pretty entertaining.