Game Reviews

Stellar Wanderer - The spaces between the stars are so lonely

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Stellar Wanderer - The spaces between the stars are so lonely

There's a danger when you make a game with the scope of a AAA title that you'll hit some of the problems of larger scale production.

Stellar Wanderer is a prime example of that. Its an impressive creation, especially on mobile, but it's also littered with some particularly frustrating bugs.

And that's really not good enough. There's a strange dead-ness to the experience as well.

You'll spend a lot of time floating through the cosmos, and while that might be an accurate depiction of deep space travel, it's just a bit dull.

There are times when the game clicks, when you feel like a pilot traversing an interesting and engaging corner of the universe.

But then you'll have to push the fast-forward button to travel ten thousand kilometres and you'll shut your brain off.

You're swooshing around space then?

Swooshing indeed. You're a young pilot out to make a living out in the big black. You fly missions for people, mine asteroids, shoot pilots, and try not to be sucked from the cockpit of your ship into the infinite nothingness that surrounds you.

It looks pretty lovely. The galaxies you're flying around are full of lush colours, the ships all have interesting designs, and there are space stations, planets, and other giant objects for you to stare at while you're buzzing around.

You can choose between two different control schemes - tilt or floating stick. Each is customisable to some degree, letting you invert your axis. Then there are buttons to speed up, slow down, shoot, and dock with stations.

More importantly there's a fast-forward button which speeds time up. This is probably the button that you're going to be pressing the most while you're playing Stellar Wanderer.

Travelling between missions is painfully dull, a fact compounded by an accelerator that only lets you fly at top speed for a set amount of time.

So you're staring at a blob in the distance, tapping to go faster, and looking at some reasonably pretty flickering stars.

When things do happen, they're quite a lot of fun, and for the most part surprisingly challenging.

Mining is just a case of shooting some big rocks, but the combat is harsh and unforgiving. You'll die quite a lot before you get to grips with things.

It's particularly frustrating when you die towards the end of a mission, because you'll get kicked back to the start of the section you last jumped to. That usually means flying from A to B to C again before you get a chance to try and shoot things.

There are RPG elements here as well. You can pick the sort of pilot you'd like to be, buy new ships and ship-bits, and increase various stats in order to become the most feared space-flying shooty man in the known universe.

So there's good and bad, but which is there more of?

Hmmmm, hard to say. There are some really annoying bugs here – one that occurred multiple times during my play-through involved me losing control of my ship and it getting stuck in a spin that only quitting the game could stop.

There are spelling and grammar problems too, and while the game isn't quite broken, it does feel like it could have done with a final lick of paint before making its way into the world.

If you like your massive space-faring epics then there's plenty here to sink your teeth into, just be aware that a lot of what you'll be biting off is going to lack any sort of taste or nutrition.

Stellar Wanderer - The spaces between the stars are so lonely

Stellar Wanderer has some massive ideas, but it's the little things, the important minute-to-minute things that it gets wrong
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Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.