Stellar Wanderer DX is a space sim, in the style of the classic Freelancer, which is one of my favourite games of all time and clearly an inspiration for this game. These games drop you into a large universe of systems, each of which is connected to others by jump gates, and you can take missions to space-fight criminals, trade commodities between stations for a profit, mine asteroids and sell the minerals, that kind of thing. Basically it’s about making money as a mercenary or freelancer, except that you’re in space. Stellar Wanderer DX is also a souped up console and PC release of a mobile game, which is probably why it’s all a bit too small and simple.
It gets the basics right. You have a ship that, whilst it looks a bit like it’s been taken from the Wipeout games, is pretty cool – which is always important – and you can shoot other ships with both lasers and missiles. Your afterburner can speed you up to get away from a particularly large volley of fire and reposition, and when you blow them all up you have a tractor beam to pull in the loot, there then are systems with bases to go to so you can sell that stuff. If you want a break from combat, there are plenty of asteroids floating around just bursting with minerals that you can mine and sell, but it’s not long before you get back to it, as space bases have missions for you to hunt down fugitives, blow up groups of enemies, and to escort ships.
Stellar Wanderer DX gives a decent first impression. It looks pretty good as you absorb the vastness of space, but get too close to bases, ships and asteroids and you’ll start to see blurry textures that make the game look a bit rough. Space is beautiful, though, and SWDX doesn’t hold back on the space effects – every system just looks gorgeous. For a little while I was playing through the campaign totally content with just escorting and/or blowing up ships in the midst of these gorgeous visuals. Sure the jump gates between systems are just small looking triangles when they should be huge, impressive, moving machinery, like a mass relay from Mass Effect, but the actual space parts look great.
However, after another hour or two, I couldn’t help but notice how it doesn’t match up to its influences in crucial ways. First of all, the systems are too small. You can fly straight across one in a few minutes, which is a little surprising when you don’t have a fast cruise speed or trade lanes to provide faster travel. Instead of having an extra fast speed, you’re stuck with just your normal engines and an afterburner. So travel in this game means using your afterburner until it runs out, waiting until it recharges, and activating it again ad nauseam. The one thing SWDX does have to help here is a 4x mode, so you can speed time itself up to make travel more bearable, but it is disabled when enemies or stations are in range.
Whilst you’re travelling, you can be attacked by enemies, though it’s less of a possibility and more of a certainty. The game seems to spawn them in to ensure it happens every time you use a jumpgate and usually at least once while you’re traversing the system. It feels strange to be complaining about space combat, but these enemies are no challenge whatsoever and appear with such regularity that it just becomes an annoyance. This is doubly true of the enemies that attack whilst you’re mid-system, because nearby enemies cause your 4x speed mode to deactivate, forcing you to deal with them if you want to speed back up. It’s always the same two ships attacking as well: a pirate and a pirate veteran.
You do become appreciably better equipped and more powerful. Not only can you upgrade your ship, but also the individual equipment, so in addition to weapons and shields, the power, hull and storage space can all be enhanced. There could be a greater variety to the equipment on offer, and some bases don’t even have missiles for you to restock, but there’s a decent amount of customisation available.
The main campaign is pretty enjoyable at first, featuring a few surprises, and most of them good. You’ll escort people between systems, fight an ungodly amount of pirates, and ignore the weak voice acting as much as possible. The bad surprise is the inclusion of races and I still cannot fathom why I have to deal with forced racing sections in open world games so often. I always find them miserably dull or frustrating with no in-between, and in SWDX they’re the former. If you want races for some reason, they should be entirely optional.
Another issue with the campaign is that if you land on a base where a campaign mission is available, it will trigger automatically. This may force you to go do that mission immediately because I once left one such station to go do a side mission before I tackled the main one and, upon returning to the base, I failed the campaign mission. Apparently, you have to do them immediately sometimes, and failing to do so is a game over and reload.
The biggest difference here between SWDX and similar games is how it feels devoid of regular life. In Freelancer, you will hear radio chatter from ships as they’re docking on stations or following trade lane procedures, but there’s none of that within SWDX, and the small size of the systems means you don’t have a contrast between pockets of civilisation and empty space.
Only a few hours into this game, I checked some stats in a menu and saw that I had already visited most of the systems and landed on most of the available bases. All I had been doing in this time was following the campaign missions, and I hadn’t seen any new upgrades for my ship’s equipment for quite some time, as that was something I’d prioritised. I’ve upgraded to a new ship, now I have my old one just sitting around on some base somewhere (and I’m paying for the privilege). There isn’t enough here, whether equipment, systems, bases, just variety in general. It becomes very repetitive very quickly.
Other than this, there’s some menu and UI awkwardness, sometimes forcing you to fiddle with the directional buttons a bit before it goes where you want it to. Also, using jump gates and landing on bases is an instant cutscene on pressing the dock button, which drains some of the immersion and takes away from the stakes. More in depth space sims might have you wait whilst your ship gets into position or fly in to engage the docking procedure, but here you push the button and you’re safe from any pursuers.
