There are glimpses of 60 frames per second when servers are fresh and populations low, but as soon as people join, the frame-rate plummets again. Simply put, Star Citizen has a frame-rate issue so bad it ruins everything. What is the point of owning a Lamborghini if you live in a neighbourhood with speed bumps and a 20mph speed limit? A friend in a shop in the hard to find hub, Grim Hex. They're beautiful machines - and for that money, they ought to be. You can see it in the wonderful animation each spaceship has for climbing into its cockpit, and you can see it in the way each craft buzzes to life as power courses through it. These are the creations it revels in and celebrates. Star Citizen is a game about spaceships - it sells them to players for hundreds of dollars, for crying out loud.

But the problem is, you can't - you can't enjoy it. Forget about all the buckets and spades which aren't there and concentrate on simply enjoying the sand with friends. Besides, this is a sandbox where we're supposed to make our own fun. I realise that Star Citizen's professions - careers to pursue, such as salvaging, smuggling, bounty hunting and so on - are still to come, like so much else. And my Mustang Alpha looking like a Transformer while in space, looking down.īut that's OK, right? This is early access and all we expect is a working core, really, with some taster content around it - enough to prove the concept and excite us like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds did, or any number of other early access games. It was all so typically Star Citizen.Įven the spaceship dogfights struggled to impress me, owing to a distinct lack of heft from the available weaponry, which feels tinny and machinegun-y rather than thumping and deadly, like a Star Wars laser cannon - and more or less the same as when I last played Star Citizen two years ago. Then it bugged and I couldn't complete it as intended. No threat, no danger, just a mission to solve an insurance claim of all things. It sounds OK, doesn't it? But there's no excitement, just a few computer terminals and panels to interact with. You are to search an eerily quiet, abandoned comms station to get to the truth. One, for instance, is an off-the-books private investigation which, admirably, can go either way depending on the evidence you find. There are a handful of missions to run, but they're tepid and boring. Most shops don't have any interactive stock and so, like the hubs and the universe around them, they contribute to the feeling of touring a giant Hollywood set: all front and no substance. Likewise, you can buy various suits of armour off mannequins in shops - one of the game's many lovely flourishes of detail - but there's no real need to other than to look cool, other than to pose for screenshots. That's my Mustang Alpha, a Starter Package ship, on the ground. You can buy fancy-looking guns, you can even buy a great big railgun, which charges up and then very satisfyingly unloads, but there's nothing to kill. It's a simulation of the highest detail and largest proportions.īut once you've seen the eye-popping sights, once you've flown down from space onto a planet and then back up again - once you've seen the beautiful Blade Runner hubs with their rebellious posters on murky walls and flickering neon lights - there's little to do. And even though there might only be a handful of planets to touch down on (for now), they are truly massive, taking probable hours to fly around. Knowing when night comes it's because of the rotations and orbits of those same planets, of those same stars, is an awesome feeling. Standing on top of a canyon on a dusty, windswept planet, looking up at the suns and moons in the sky and knowing you can fly up to them is hair-raisingly cool. But as a picture-postcard-maker - as a demonstration of technology - it's virtually peerless. As it stands, at major milestone alpha 3.0, Star Citizen does not convince as a game. Star Citizen is a bit like an Instagram account: what you see looks amazing but the reality is hollow.

Star citizen review