Starlight Inception

Starlight Inception is arguably one of the most inconsistent games to come out of the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter.

For $150,000, developer Escape Hatch Entertainment has done the unthinkable in creating a vast, realistic, and inexpensive answer to X-Wing and its ilk.

But there's a cost. Aspects of Starlight Inception feel under-developed - or worse, simply broken - resulting in a game that aims for the stars, but barely makes it past lift-off.

_{Starlight Inception can look really pretty}

Understanding the basic premise of how Starlight Inception works is a tedious affair. When a game has a host of intricacies, barking a tutorial at super-sonic speed leaves you confused, with next to no idea how the gameplay actually works.

You know you're supposed to shoot stuff, but you're going to have to get blown up a few times before anything starts to make sense.

Here's the kicker, though: Once Starlight Inception makes sense, and you're making calls on the fly, there's a glimpse of a marvellous game trying its hardest to break free.

Remember the iconic scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star? What you don't see in that scene is Luke changing the velocity of his X-wing, or adjusting thrusters so he doesn't crash into the walls of the channel he's flying down.

The reason that's not shown on the big screen is because it'd be horrifically boring. But in a video game, that level of micromanagement adds an air of realism to what would otherwise be an inane case of pew-pewing everything is sight.

Ships in Starlight Inception have four power cores: thrusters, defence, regeneration, and guns. At the start, each core has four bars, but you only have eight cells to put into them.

So you could choose to balance them evenly - two cells in each core. Or you could decide to go gun-heavy - four points in guns, and four points regeneration so your lasers recharge faster.

I found myself constantly adjusting my ship, diverting full-power to thrusters when going from point A-to-B, but beefing up my guns and shields when venturing through enemy territory.

It's kind of like being the Captain of The Starship Enterprise in that respect: power to forward thrusters! Activate shields! Charge up lasers!

Gameplay is where Starlight Inception is at its strongest. There's fun to be had in its tactical pseudo-realistic approach to space combat, so long as you don’t mind missions that follow the rudimental premise of Fly There, Shoot That.

But, is that enough?

No it isn't.

Starlight Inception is beset with issues. Graphically it's inconsistent. While ships and some sectors of space look striking, there are planets with textures that look flat and lifeless.

And take the first-person cockpit - it should look as good as the outer ship, but for some odd reason the first-person view shows an arm with barely any frames of animation, which results in a clumsy-looking mess.

The game also often finds itself struggling to run smoothly. Music jumps when the screen gets too busy, there are occasional bouts of lag, and no matter how hard I tried the motion control option left my ship spinning in circles.

There's also a story that rears its head from time to time, but it's entirely ignorable.

Oh yeah, and there's a space station you can walk around in first-person, which seems like a nice idea until you realise that you can't actually do anything in these sections, rendering them utterly pointless.

Part of me really wanted to like Starlight Inception, and to some extent I did. Space combat is fun for a while, but that's cold comfort when every other aspect of the game is apparently trying to hamper your enjoyment.

This ship could still fly with one or two holes in, but when those holes turn to craters it's time to disembark.