Space Empires: Starfury

The Good
Although the story is pretty standard, it is still well-developed and builds as you work your way into the campaigns. You start out trying to infiltrate the pirate group in order to gain information and build from there to find the ultimate cause of the thefts of artifacts from an earlier race.

The game is very open such that you can play basically any kind of character that you want to. Even following the story, you can play your character however you want so long as you stay friendly with the right people in the campaign. All man-made (or alien-made) objects are destructible in the game, so you can easily play the pirate who is out to destroy every ship and star base that you find. Or you can play the illegal trader who trades in illegal goods. The choices are up to you.

The graphics are decent for the game, but nothing special. Still, they worked well. Seeing the fire and gases billowing out of your ship (or someone else's ship) when it's severely damaged is a nice addition to the graphics.

There are also many upgrades you can make to your ship as well as purchasing a decent number of ships from various human, alien, or pirate shipyards. This allows you to play around with building your ship to suit your needs.

The Bad
The game is played using only 1-axis. You can turn, but you cannot go up or down in the game. That's a step backwards from games like Freelancer which was a nice game using full 3D space.

Although the graphics are pretty decent for the game, like I said they were nothing special and in some cases were a problem. It is VERY easy to crash into a planet or an asteroid because it is the same color (or very close) as the space around it. If you don't watch your radar, you risk crashing. Also, planets and space stations aren't much bigger than your ship which puts things a bit out of perspective.

If you happen to like picking up items that are dropped when something is destroyed, unless you check every item before picking it up, you risk suddenly becoming an enemy of just about everyone nearby because as soon as you pick up any illegal cargo, you become an enemy. Of course, you can immediately drop it again and then they are friendly again. Still, that makes for unrealistic actions by the AI.

There are also no real conversations in the game. All conversations are either in the form of a communication letter stating what you have to do for the next mission, or as a one-way communication from a nearby ship stating something like "nice to have you around" or "ship on your bow."

Finally, ships will not chase you very far in this game and will not go through a worm hole (portal) to get you. That means that if you have a decent speed ship, you can avoid almost all combat without a problem. There are also never any reinforcements unless the campaign purposely includes new ships arriving in a system.

The Bottom Line
This is a fun game based on the Space Empires universe and can be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, for those who have played games like Freelancer, or other new space sims, there are many things lacking in this game.

Overall, it is worth playing and you really do have more freedom than you do in Freelancer.