Drizzlehell
Banned
Huh, where do I even begin... Well, okay, but don't you dare to complain that it's too long and you didn't read. You asked.
So, basically, it's space combat and trading sim, similar to games like Elite, Wing Commander: Privateer, or the X series. You're dumped into an open-ended sandbox where you can pick up a variety of missions, ranging from bounty hunting, mining, and trading, to various objective-based assignments, eg. "go find a crashed ship, find out what happened, retrieve some stuff while you're there, maybe shoot someone in the face". In other words, you're being given a set of tools and a big sandbox to play around in, and sure enough, it may also lead to some emergent situations that the devs may not have predicted. There is no big overarching story or cinematic-driven quests that you need to follow and because of that, you may have to adjust your expectations before you go in because if you're expecting Mass Effect then you're gonna be sorely disappointed. If you never were into games like the ones that I mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph, then I don't think Star Citizen will be your cup of coffee either, although it might just change your mind for the reasons that I will mention a bit later. However, if you already know what kind of a game you're getting into then it's some seriously impressive shit. Comparisons to Elite Dangerous are appropriate but ED's galaxy is simply too huge to lead to any meaningful emergent gameplay, while Star Citizen's more compact system of planets is much more suited for an experience where players themselves are able to forge their own stories, both through interactions with the game's various systems and with each other.
Now, there are a couple of things that set SC apart from all those other sandbox space games, though.
The first one is the production quality, which is, like, triple-A level. Other space sims like X4 only look and play decently when you're flying around in a ship but as soon as you disembark on a space station it's jank city. Star Citizen, on the other hand, looks just as impressive inside and outside of the cockpit. The gameplay has the same level of polish when you're boots on the ground, shooting bandits and pirates with your assault rifle, as it does when you dogfight them in space. And I was honestly really surprised how well made all of this is. Each of the individual gameplay mechanics are done well enough to be their own separate games and at no point did I get the impression that they've been trying to cut corners on any of them because they didn't expect the players to spend too much time doing it.
The second standout feature in this game is the emphasis on the immersive aspect. To paint you a better picture, let me walk you through the first hour or so of the game. When you first boot up the persistent universe and create your character, you wake up in your own small apartment in the city that you picked as your default starting location (or, to put it simply, home). You look around the place, fiddle around with various objects, check your inventory, and then head out to explore the hubs in the immediate vicinity. If you want, you can visit a nightclub, walk around the recreational area, or head to the shopping strip to buy some gear and provisions for the road. You then make your way to the metro station and take a trip to the spaceport where you can pick up your ship in the hangar and leave the city. Whether you choose to do a couple of flybys over the city or head straight up and into space is up to you but from there you can have a look at your journal and select a random mission, or join up with some other players for some more challenging raids. New notifications for available team-up opportunities pop up on your HUD all the time. But the most amazing thing about all of what I just described is that at no point will you ever see a loading screen or get interrupted with a prebaked animation or a cutscene. All of this gameplay is completely uninterrupted and it really does create a palpable sense of immersion that I don't think I've seen in any other game of this type before.
So while it's not exactly the most complete space game that I've played, it already has enough stuff in it to feel like an actual game that you can spend dozens, if not hundreds of hours dicking around in, and that incredible sense of immersion and production quality really set it apart from any other space game with a persistent universe. And speaking of its direct competitors again, IMO Star Citizen already feels way more complete and entertaining than Elite Dangerous but you don't see anyone bitching about ED being a scam. And the reason for that, I think, can be basically boiled down to semantics - the only thing that sets these two games apart is that Elite saw an official 1.0 release back in 2014. This means that technically the game was "released" as a "complete" product, but in reality, it was so bare bones that you could barely call it a prototype. Nobody talks about how it took Frontier another 7 years to expand it to something that resembles a fun game and not a tedious grind fest, and that's because, again, they had an official release date. Funny how that works...
Anyway, that's about what I have for now. I'm still just starting out with this game so my feelings on it might change the more I play, but after spending a few hours with it, I'd say it's not exactly the kind of scam that everyone seems to think it is, but it's far from being a complete game either. There's also some shady scumfuckery going on with Squadron 42 that they're still trying to sell you when you sign up for Star Citizen, even though the last update on that thing was back in 2018, but let's not get into that now...
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