So, I picked this up in mid February. I was in need of a fresh distraction, and this looked to be an inexpensive one. And its from the Prison Architect people, so that's pedigree. The demo was fun too, so I rolled the dice on the full version. I played it pretty intensely for a week, before pausing, and reassessing it. What follows is a brief discussion of it's positives, before moving onto wider discussion.
The Last Starship is a sandbox spaceship game, with a variety of gameplay styles. You can variously play as bounty hunter, courier, industrialist, cruise liner, or just stick to a thread of story missions that might teach you how to be those things. Mostly these are bite-sized chunks of gameplay, and you can pace yourself however you want. One aspect where it does stand out is it's 2D art direction. Your ship is always presented from the same isometric angle, so the universe spins around you as you turn. It's honestly a fun thing to do. Visuals are generally characterful and the combat isn't without it's charms. You switch into tactical mode, which has a wireframe/radar vibe, and things become about inertia and positioning. It's very age-of-sail at first, with ships kiting around each-other and such. Ship customisation is very much a thing, and it's probably the thing that the game does best. Yes, you can treat it as a base builder with a FTL drive bolted on, but there's definitely more things to be doing, with facilities to manage entire fleets of ships. Its pretty in it's way, with a lot of variety in things to do, and it's priced at 15 quid. Its a good value proposition, is what I'm saying. So why did I go off it like I did?
One thought that did occur to me after 12 hours or so of fumbling around, was that I wasn't sure if the game was complex or shallow. There's an awful lot presented to you at the start, it's a big sandbox even before you get into other game modes. Figuring out the various systems is a big part of the experience, and you're probably gonna need to look at the odd YouTube video or two, despite in-game help. However, once I got a working knowledge of something, the game suddenly felt a bit simple and small. One thing I took to quite quickly was mining and smelting ore. I found a good spot, put in systems so I could produce my own fuel etc, parked up, and cranked up the game speed. I'd effectively turned this into an idle game, my efforts being so profitable that the bits I still had to buy were trivial percentages. My ship became like a cancerous tumor of capitalism, relentlessly consuming, expanding, while my faceless and totally interchangeable crew do muscle work. I got bored after that, and decided to do something else for a bit, easily buying my way into whatever I wanted to. I didn't bother with the robot arm and track automation stuff either, because there didn't feel a need. Ships have to get real big before human crew stop being practical. My point? Well, once you get to a certain level of wealth both risk and the desire to innovate kinda drops off. Sorry folks, this is no longer a games review, its Babbee's First Marxism. I suppose there's the creative mode if you just want to skip all that.
This is not me saying the gameplay loop is bad, I actually found it to be rather intoxicating in my neurodivergent way. But I would say the gameplay is functional and perfunctory in what it does, but rarely noteworthy at something. A jack of all trades, if you will. It's a typical example of it's genre I think, the sandbox aspects being a mixed blessing. Or I just found an obvious way to break the difficulty progression, I'm not totally sure. I did notice that much of the logistics and industry were relatively basic and automated. You have mining lasers to mine stuff out, and drones to collect the resources for example. And they will do this of their own accord, but direct instruction, of anything, isn't something the game does. There's no immediate scarcity of resources, nor large scale economics model that noticed, so it can feel like mining for mining's sake. Most of it feels like content for content's sake TBH. Or possibly a game that hasn't quite matured from its Early Access period. Ultimately, the it didn't hold my interest after its good first impression.
While I've not tried everything The Last Starship has to offer, I have spent 19 hours with it at time of writing, so I think I've seen a lot. And I think I've got a good way to sum it up. It's like an inexpensive buffet breakfast at a hotel. None of it is really that great, but most of it's OK. I've spent more to get less, but unless some killer DLC comes out for this, I doubt it will have a lasting impact.
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