Star Citizen - review, the most ambitious game of all time, it earned

From time to time, Star Citizen hosts so-called Free Fly events that allow you to run around the world for free and see what the developers have added there. We honestly visited them every time and made sure that the game does not work at all. It is understandable: the plans for Cloud Imperium Games were such that they looked more like a fairy tale than something that can actually be played in the foreseeable future. Eerily realistic space with honest physics, the ability to land on any point of various planets, a lively economy, shootouts, piracy, trade and only Chris Roberts knows what else: all this really smacked of some ugly fraud.

But here we were waiting for constant lags, brakes and crashes, seasoned with sky-high system requirements, incredibly long downloads and a fantastic number of bugs. It was almost impossible to play it. You could take an Elevator on one planet and Wake up in a bed on another after five minutes of loading. To tell the truth, we have long put an end to the game and safely forgot about it. But in September 2020, Star Citizen suddenly started working. Of course, with caveats like some of the mechanics still not working, a meager selection of tasks, and only one star system, but it worked, damn it!

Now you can PLAY Star Citizen. And it turned out to be extremely interesting to play it, even taking into account the fact that we are still in deep alpha. The essence of the project is that we have a full-fledged Sci-Fi sandbox that lives according to the real laws of physics, and we can do whatever we want there. The developers themselves now call their offspring the now fashionable term Immersive Sim. And, in General, they do not exaggerate. You can achieve any goal in a huge number of ways, and the degree of immersion is off the scale.

The game is captivating because it is always honest with you. If you try to shove the Shuttle into the cargo Bay of the ship and still shove it, you can take it wherever you want. If you decide to go down "vooot in that forest on the opposite side of the planet", you can land nearby and take a quiet walk there. If one of the gas giant's moons suddenly went dark, then the fact is that it simply turned the other side to the local star — and did it because of rotation around its own axis, and not at the behest of the script.

This amazing honesty makes an impression. Light falls on objects in accordance with the laws of physics, including interaction with the gas envelope of celestial bodies. The same sun will look different from the planet's atmosphere, from the rocky moon, and from space. And the game of lighting from the restaurant of a luxury interstellar yacht, when it makes maneuvers in airless space, generally conquers once and for all.

Progression works the same way. Maybe you like to deliver the goods? Over time, you will become famous as a well-known courier, and such tasks will be showered with an order of magnitude more. The economy is also being refined in the same direction in order to make it more lively. Like the one that works in EVE Online, although the comparison is not quite correct, because the games are very different in nature. The law enforcement system is also honest and transparent. Kill cops, other players, or complete special smuggling tasks? Get ready for the fact that you will be welcome only at special pirate stations, and a reward will be set for your head. And by the way, both NPCs and real players will want to get it, so the gameplay in this case is completely different.

In General, Star Citizen is very fond of blaming various aspects of the game on the players themselves. For example, there is practically no tutorial. Beginners should be trained by other and more experienced pilots, taking them under their caring wing. We were lucky: our guide to the world of the game was the streamer KungLi. No kidding: it's almost impossible to figure out Star Citizen on your own in a short time. This is a huge, complex and categorically different game compared to other projects.

It is important to mention that the main character here is the pilot, not his ship. All the action takes place in the first person. We go through the stations ourselves, call a starship at the docks, land, take off, fly to another planet, get out and do other things on our own two feet. The ship is critical, but it is only a ship. The main actions are always performed by the pilot. He can stop the car in the middle of the void, go out into the airlock and take a selfie against the background of his metal giant. The main thing is not to forget to stop and put on a helmet-we speak from personal experience, Yes. All the same pilot will drag the notorious boxes on Board and with a machine gun to crush the pirates at some remote station. Of course, the machine will have to be pre-purchased, as well as a more or less decent spacesuit. Varieties of small arms and armor are full here, and each sample can be modified using a number of modules. Of course, you shouldn't wait for the call of Duty Armory, but that's not what the game is about.

After all, the real fetish in it is ships. They are worked out in such detail and detail, as if they are real cars from real manufacturers. Looking at the next starship, with experience you begin to understand what kind of company produced it and what it is intended for. Someone is adapted for mining (and mining here is a rather interesting minigame), and someone transports goods. There are exclusively military vehicles, landing craft, luxury premium class yacht and even a giant garbage collector. There are quite a lot of types of spaceships, and this is understandable, because some can be purchased not only for in-game currency, but also for real money. By the way, very big.

In addition to the destination and manufacturer, ships are divided by class. You can travel both on a single-seat maneuverable, but low-power civilian car, and on giant corvettes designed for a crew of a dozen people. And soon they promise to introduce giant frigates. All this stuff can be equipped with various weapons systems and power units like a shield generator or a hyperdrive engine. In a word, there is a place to roam.

Everything else like armor, gadgets and small arms is much cheaper. But it is very difficult to save up even for a mid-class boat. You will have to do a LOT of tasks. You can, of course, closely engage in trade, which promises considerable benefits, but it needs some start-up capital. Plus, given that there are still crashes and crashes in the game, it is very easy to lose all your fortune invested in the cargo, so at the current stage it is the path of the merchant that is the most adrenaline-fueled. However, going to a shootout to hell on the horns alone is also quite risky, given that in the absence of a medical compartment on the ship (and there is only one on a few very expensive ships), you will be reborn on the nearest visited station or planet. But here, at least, you will only lose time.

By the way, many larger ships are designed for a crew of several operators, so managing everything together with friends is much easier and more fun. Turrets provide additional firepower, landing is more comfortable when you are covered by a friend, and even simple delivery missions are much more pleasant in a team: one steers, and the second lands on the surface and drags boxes into the hold. After all, Star Citizen is an MMO.

Combat missions, delivery, trade and mining are not limited to everything. You can do, for example, search for wrecked ships, identify bodies hanging in weightlessness (which is quite creepy) and perform not very numerous story tasks yet. There is even a fun opportunity to work as a taxi driver. As in some "Uber" you look for an order for transportation left by another player, take it and get money from it. Even asterisks will be allowed to put.

The main charm of the game so far, however, is not in the tasks, but in the research. Already, Star Citizen is one of the most feature-rich sandboxes. Here we can go to any of the planets and satellites of the Stanton launch system, which, I must say, are very diverse. Of the moon are as different as the landscape, and gravity. Somewhere there is a semblance of atmosphere, and somewhere there is not. Many old-timers like to arrange races on all-terrain vehicles and space bikes on one of them, and sometimes fly over the surface on sports shuttles (and here there are also such). The planets also differ significantly. For example, one of them is one huge city like Coruscant, and the other boasts a whole set of different biomes.

Probably, this story would be incomplete without concrete examples of how to entertain ourselves in these few days we managed. So, please: first of all, we took a cruise yacht and went to look at various stations and planets. During quantum jumps, you can go down to the restaurant, sauna or swimming pool. And the views from behind the glass sides are fantastic. I must say that it's been a long time since we've seen a game with such a bright and rich atmosphere of space adventure. All the sounds of the environment, music, the appearance of ships, planets and stations, jumping into hyperspace-all this gives you the feeling that you are in one of the scenes of "Star Trek" or your favorite science fiction books.

The first trip showed that this is really good Sci-Fi. The game has a fairly rich ENT, which is served through dialogues, quests and descriptions, but most importantly — through the picture. A pirate station sounds and looks exactly what a pirate station should look like. There are spikes, distorted neon signs, and graffiti-covered walls. But the technology-filled planet is bursting with futurism. High-speed trains, fancy electronics stores, and skyscrapers are all around.

By the way, when asked who thought of building a huge city in the middle of a region of the planet with an average daily temperature of minus 90 degrees, I received a logical answer that the ruling faction of technocrats there just needs such a climate to cool numerous equipment. And in fact, why cool down the computing centers yourself, when nature can do it for you?

Of course, our adventures were not limited to this. After an unsuccessful attempt to reach the local bartenders, we went to the moon, where we called a huge research ship and a small SUV that resembles a mix of MAKO from Mass Effect and a desert buggy. We drove him through the cargo lock to the starship and went to explore the remote corners of the existing planets. On one of them, we landed right on the ice of the frozen ocean, unloaded the all-terrain vehicle and began to drift between huge icebergs. Then we drove to the coast, 20 minutes moving through the snow-covered desert to find the forested foothills. And this is impressive, considering that we are talking about remote and uninhabited parts of this world, which from the stratosphere seemed surprisingly small and compact.

We also had time to hunt for heads. However, without much success, as the pirate turned out to be a very experienced pilot, smashed a couple of patrol fighters and disappeared into the atmosphere of the rocky moon. We also managed to recapture a yacht captured by terrorists, cover a drug den, get a permanently fogged helmet due to a bug, and travel further almost blindly. Well, the cherry on the cake was the unloading of the all-terrain vehicle on the roof of one of the skyscrapers and the subsequent leap of faith on the streets closed to the public. In short, the game is quite easy to entertain yourself — it would be a fantasy.

Yes, Cloud Imperium Games is waiting for a Titanic job. Many mechanics will have to come up with from scratch, something globally remake, and something just to bring to mind. Yes, so far we only have one star system. Yes, there are still enough unpleasant bugs, and the system requirements are quite evil. But now, finally, we were able to play Star Citizen ourselves and get a lot of fun out of it. Now, in the end, it became clear that progress in development is still there, and the money spent by players goes not only to the salary of Chris Roberts. After all, Cloud Imperium Games has taken a swing at something that no one has ever done before, and the current version has finally shown that the intended goals are achievable. Of course, the announced 100+ systems are still very far away, but the main gameplay elements are slowly starting to work. It is important to note that Star Citizen already boasts a combination of most of the mechanics available in other space simulators separately, and some local features are even more unique.

It is difficult to guess how long the development will last and whether it will ever end — especially given the fact that the game still has a large-scale single-player campaign, a session first-person shooter and a session space combat simulator. But now, in any case, players will have somewhere to fly in space, while the development of the project, which has become the most expensive game in history, continues. But at the same time, perhaps, the most ambitious.