StarRupture Preview
Imagine this: you’re a prisoner, but instead of sitting in a dreary cell, you’re sent to a distant planet to work off your sentence. Thanks to its proximity to a dying star, this planet is regularly bombarded by mineral-rich meteors. Arcadia-7 is like a planet from a science fiction travel brochure. It’s beautiful and deadly, stark and colorful, full of potential and danger in equal measure. StarRupture welcomes you to your new home.
A Whole New World
One of StarRupture’s obvious strengths is how fully imagined Arcadia-7 is. This intricate, fully explorable open world is a collection of Earth-like biomes and truly extraterrestrial spaces. Plant life is abundant, but a lot of it is deadly. There are vast areas underground and the remains of long-abandoned bases to explore,…also potentially deadly.
Your task, if you ever hope to be free again, is to do whatever your corporate overlords ask you to do. Generally, this means extracting and processing Arcadia-7’s abundant supply of minerals and sometimes chemical raw materials. Of course, this requires an ever-more-complex series of construction tasks. You need to build a habitat, power supplies, extractors and launchers to shoot the products into space. Then it’s back to your communication portal and taking on the next contract.
If you’ve played games like Satisfactory, you’re in the ballpark with StarRupture. Every task is broken down into subtasks, bits of gathering and construction. I had a chance to play a few small slices of the game, and came away impressed by the clear and logical objectives and the ease of construction. A lot of StarRupture’s potential busywork is automated or streamlined, allowing you to focus on the big picture and creative construction mayhem. If you’ve watched YouTube channels like Let’s Game It Out, you know that games like StarRupture have the potential for some pretty wild, outside-the-box mechanics.
Not All Friendly-Like
Arcadia-7 is a pretty inhospitable place, all things considered. There’s a lite survival element at play, so you need to pay attention to hunger, thirst and injuries. Mainly, potential injuries come in the form of attacks by the planet’s insect-like indigenous wildlife, which range from small, dog-sized bugs to massive boss-size creatures. You’re not defenseless, however. StarRupture allows you to build and customize a wide range of weapons.
While I didn’t have a chance to try it first hand, a large component of StarRupture is multiplayer. You can work with others to build and fight. It makes sense that you can be much more productive when others are cooperatively building satellite factories and the work load is shared. When the alien hordes attack it’s also nice to have back up.
Building for the Future
Thanks to its shiny Unreal Engine 5 graphics, StarRupture is looking pretty sharp as it gets ready for Early Access release, minus some bugs and graphical hiccups in the very early build I played. The score is mostly ambient and synth-heavy, and the environmental audio and factory sounds are fairly minimal. There’s quite a bit of voiced dialogue, and the game is going for a mixture of seriousness and snarky humor, which is a little hit-or-miss. Overall, the tone and look of StarRupture are a bit grittier and more grounded than in Satisfactory.
There’s undeniable pleasure in creating intricate webs of machines in games like StarRupture and then watching everything work, or in exploring new spaces and discovering whatever treasures they hold. That chill rhythm is at the heart of StarRupture, too, but it adds a bit of mystery and danger to keep things interesting. Although the game is only at the starting gate, StarRupture has a lot of potential and a strong foundation.
***PC code provided by the publishers for preview***
