14 DAY TRIAL // After last year’s successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, Garry Gaber, former project leader on Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, and his team started working on a new space combat simulator called Starlight Inception, a game that promises to deliver the action and excitement you’ve always dreamed of since the glory days of Wing Commander, X-Wing and Freespace 2.
[admark=1]With more than a year in development, Escape Hatch Entertainment has released an early beta version of the game to showcase some of its features before the final version is out.
The plot in Starlight Inception takes you one hundred years from tomorrow, before the outbreak of the World War IV. You take the role of a young space fighter pilot, assigned to the star carrier U.S.F. Midway, who finds himself dragged in an interplanetary war just a few days after he enrolled.
After a massive attack on five Earth cities, claimed by the marauders of the Non-Aligned Nations, the rest of the world and the colonies of the Solar System formed an alliance called the United Star Force. Its target: to obliterate the NAN and put an end to this war before it’s too late.
In the Beta, you will only be able to experience the first mission of the game on board of one of the team’s favorite ships, the “Lightning.” It might not seem much, but this way you will get the chance to play through the first few minutes of the game and familiarize yourself with the controls.
During the course of the mission, you will learn how to control your ship, how to use the available weapons, how to select your targets and other information that will be of good use in your adventure.
Since this is all we have right now, let’s talk a little about the features to be present in the final version of the game. Starlight Inception will offer two gameplay modes. One is mission-based, with a full storyline centered on our pilot and his missions through the fourth World War. The missions will vary from standard shoot’em up operations to rescue and salvage tasks.
The second game mode is aimed at the more casual players, putting you in a situation where you have to defend your mothership from the incoming attacks in a unique blend of action and 3D tower defense minigame. Begin engaging the enemy right away, deploy turrets and destroy the incoming marauders in order to survive.
If you manage to complete all the objectives and side quests, you will earn command prestige points that can be used to purchase better ships, equipment, weapons and drone wingmen.
A feature that I’m looking forward to see in action is the possibility to fly from space directly through the atmosphere and down to the surface of various planets from the Star System. From the methane lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan to the surface of Mars and even as far as Neptune, you will get to explore the galaxy like never before.
Multiplayer will also be present in the form of three different modes including: Deathmatch, Capture the Ball and Football Mode that will put players in massive head-to-head space battles.
Gaining more prestige will give you access to over thirty different ships (spacefighters, bombers and transports) that can be collected as you would collect cars in Gran Turismo.
Not much can be said about the current Beta version, as many of the core features are missing, but the developer promises to add more missions and new features in the coming weeks before launch.
The sound and graphics are not that impressive at the moment, but they are going to get a major overhaul in the near future. While the developer promises to make Starlight Inception an interstellar experience you’ll never forget, we’re looking forward to play the full version and write an in-depth review of the game.
