Star Conflict Review

I was really craving an open-world sandbox game that I could play, so one day I was browsing around on Steam's tags looking for games that might fit that profile. One of these games was a free to play space game called Star Conflict. I looked at some of the footage for the game and thought: Great! I'll check this out and see if it's any fun.

When I launched the game for the first time, I realized I had made a mistake. Why? I saw the Gaijin logo on the screen and immediately thought of War Thunder. War Thunder, for those of you who may not know, is a pretty good multiplayer combat game where you fly planes and shoot at people. Recently they've added tanks and I think they will be adding naval ships later on as well. In any case, I really enjoyed War Thunder for its dogfighting, but I never knew Gaijin games for making open world games. War Thunder is not an open world game. To be fair, I guess I've never really played any other games by Gaijin, so I was still hopeful and I pressed on.

The game is actually very similar to War Thunder. You have some ships, you grind in PvP sessions, and you eventually rank up to newer, better ones. The combat seemed to be more dependent on using skills that your plane had, which I didn't like that much as I liked the more concrete strategy present in War Thunder. I don't really enjoy the idea of pressing "3" to activate an ability that could save my life or help me kill someone, but I do like the idea of manuvering my plane so that it's harder for the enemy following me to shoot me. If you're like me, you will probably find War Thunder more enjoyable. Well, I guess if you're actually like me you don't really enjoy PvP games that much, so it's sort of a moot suggestion.

You are also able to maneuver your ship in any direction you want, but the way they did it almost completely killed any strategy concerning the movement of your ship. There was one map where this increased maneuverability made the game more fun because there were a lot of floating obstacles, but it was an unusual map compared to the other more open maps.

A couple of hours into the game I basically gave up on any hope of an open-world aspect to the game. But, strangely enough, I was having a good bit of fun. I'm usually not a fan of grinding, but it was thoroughly more enjoyable to do than in War Thunder. I think this is because grinding happens much faster in Star Conflict and it feels a lot more... satisfying. I'm not really 100% sure what it is.

Maybe it was purely the fact that I was unlocking ships faster than War Thunder, which helped the game feel more novel for a longer amount of time. On the other hand, it was pretty nice to be able to easily acquire the cash currency with the in-game currency (I'm not sure if they added this in War Thunder). Sure, it was expensive to convert to currency, but having this option available to me felt like the rewards I got from every mission mattered more. After a day or two of playing I was already a fifth of the way to buying the largest pack of Galactic Standards (the name of the cash currency), which costed 5 million credits (the in-game currency). In addition, you get premium account status for free as a new player and this increases the rewards you get.

It was also pretty cool to get ships and increase their 'synergy' level to the max level, which increased the fleet strength of your account, which allowed you to rank other ships faster. It provided a nice reason to go back and play lower ranked ships and it fulfilled a completionist itch to see ships reach max synergy.

But anyway, after reaching Rank 4, or something like that, the game suddenly introduced an open world area that you could do quests in. It caught me by surprise, as I was no longer expecting it and I thought that the tags on Steam were just incorrect. It was really boring. There wasn't much to do and most quests amount to just go to X location (and traveling takes forever) and kill someone or pick up something. This happened pretty late in the game for me (a few hours into the game) and if there were more interesting things to do, I never got to it. Perhaps they should have introduced it earlier if there were more interesting things to do in the open-world space.

Perhaps my last gripe is that one of the missions requires you to buy premium missiles for one of your ships and use them in one battle. Sure, I thought, I can spend 15 Galactic Standards to do that once and unlock it for forever on this ship. After the battle though, I realized how mistaken I was as I received a notification that my craft was automatically resupplied; this meant buying the missiles for 15 Galactic Standards again. I was pretty mad about that. I realize you can turn off auto-supply, but that kind of decision shouldn't just creep up on you like that. I thought buying the missiles meant I just unlocked it, rather than it being a consumable.

After the premium account status ran out, it was pretty clear I wasn't really enjoying the game that much. The gameplay wasn't that much fun and I realized the biggest appeal to me was the somewhat amusing idea of possibly buying the premium account status with the credits I had and using the benefits from the premium account status to perpetually buy premium account status. That and also unlocking all of the ships and getting max synergy on all of them.

It would be pretty cool if the grinding experience could be applied to War Thunder. If it was, I probably would enjoy War Thunder a lot more than I do now.