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Dead Star is a generally fun mashup of MOBAs and twin-stick shooters.
By Leif Johnson
Multiplayer online battle arenas rarely have a need for a strong narrative background: In a game like League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm, you can chuck a bunch of characters with conflicting motives onto a table and order them to fight and no one will bat an eye. Death Star is a little like that with its three races, but I learned there’s a deeper story hidden in casual lines in the tutorial and hidden text snippets in the options. You can rightly regard it as little more than a MOBA mixing in elements of top-down twin-stick shooters, but as it turns out, this is also the tale of a bunch of war criminals and general scum doomed to battle for scraps in a dying solar system until its red giant goes supernova. And that’s the overarching theme of the whole experience–an unexpected degree of depth hidden below a simple and accessible veneer.
Allow me to push the analogy further, and I’ll say a few issues with the lore also presage the few issues with the game itself. That supernova bit, for instance? That’ll never happen: red giants die with a whimper, not a bang.
But all this spacey stuff certainly allows for a generally awesome sci-fi aesthetic, which reveals itself in details like the avatars given out as achievement awards that look like they were pulled from cyberpunk graphic novels or Marvel’s Infinity Gauntlet. Toss in the fact that Metroid Prime alum Todd Keller serves as the art director, and Dead Star emerges as an uncommonly visually appealing experience for its price.
You Got Twin-Stick in My MOBA
And the game is generally fun, too. The skeleton here is familiar 5v5 and 10v10 MOBA stuff: you know, the capturing of enemy bases, the securing of outposts, and the selection of new abilities for your fighter as the match progresses. Blast apart surrounding asteroids for ore, pump them into your home base or the outposts you capture on the way to the enemy base, and boom, you’ve got some buffs that augment the surrounding defenses. Same old, same old.
One of Dead Star’s gorgeous views.
But Dead Star brings some notable and interesting differences, particularly as regards the ships doing the fighting. There’s only nine of them (with three tiers for small, medium, or large ships), but that doesn’t seem so small a number in action on account of the impressive variety of abilities they bring. What’s more, all these abilities are impressively balanced, to the point that I never felt completely helpless regardless of what ship I was in.
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Dead Star is an uncommonly visually appealing experience for its price.
Take the plodding, powerful Justicar, which emits a powerful repair field that heals friendly units and slices up enemies with lightning cannon I can control with the right stick. It can easily hold its own. Then there’s the tiny Razor, which surrounds itself with an “energy saw” that slices through anyone foolish enough to get too close, and it can even put on some hurt when it whisks past a passing Justicar. Medium ships like the Bulldog also have some cool toys like the Time Bomb, but I rarely used them since the smallest and the biggest tiers seemed too effective with their fast-versus-powerful roles to bother with a jack-of-all-trades.
One of the great things about Dead Star is that I could bring all three along anyway if I changed my mind about needing that Time Bomb. Dead Star makes a welcome break from most MOBA designs by letting its players switch between the three ships as needed in a match. It’s great for dealing with gaps in strategy when the need arises. When I noticed my teammates were doing a shoddy job of keeping the outposts we captured stocked with ore, I’d hop in my Razor and dart about blasting rocks instead of jocks. When my teammates were making a heavy push on the enemy base, I’d hop in my Justicar and keep them healed so they wouldn’t have to fly all the way back from the nearest outpost. It’s especially a nice way of dealing with the little vagaries of a match, such as when a key role gets dropped because a teammate rage quits.
Cracks in the Hull
That didn’t happen too often, but it occurs with enough frequency to call attention to some of the flaws in Dead Star’s design. As things stand, teams who capture a few outposts early on will have an almost guaranteed chance of winning, partly because upgrading them with ore augments them to the point that it’s tough to take them out without a concerted effort. And right now, with so many teams on the PC and PS4 (which amount to the same, as Dead Star supports cross play) playing in random groups, those efforts just don’t happen. It doesn’t help that Dead Star favors defense, as players defending an outpost will respawn in a handful of seconds at the very outpost being attacked. It also doesn’t help that Dead Star has an awful tendency to dump new players into the middle of a match in progress, when coordination over voice chat has already broken down and most players have given up.
Lasers, lasers everywhere.
This tragic state of affairs isn’t always the case. With two sets of more or less equally matched teams, Red Star’s matches approach near artistry. Those coordinated attacks actually happen, and players switch out roles when they need to and agree upon objectives. I was blessed to experience that three times, and once with what I believe was awfully random group. (The randomized grids that make up the battle map, we said, aligned in our favor.) Unfortunately, most players joining random groups will come to fear teams, and I found the matchmaer paired my little newbie companions against groups with multiple ships leveled well into the teens far too often. The aforementioned balance at least allows random players to put up a decent fight, but in the end the resistance dies out like the star itself.
That’s been my experience with Dead Star, and I admit it hasn’t been the full one. One of the big selling points of Dead Star is that it supposedly includes an “Escape Run” mode that triggers from a rare drop, and it lets you and your team escort a capital ship as you sail through other matches in progress, keeping the ship intact and fighting off other players on a third front. Sounds fun, right? Alas, it’s so rare that I never actually saw it in my gameplay, and neither has anyone else I know.
I’m happy to report that Dead Star is fun enough that I want to keep playing it to see what this plays like in practice. And considering that it’s currently free for PlayStation Plus members? That’s a compelling reason to jump in while Dead Star is still full of life from its recent release.
The Verdict
Dead Star has the basics of combat and ship balance right, to the point that even losses have their fun moments. Its primary shortcoming is that it allows too great an advantage for pre-made groups, which is especially a problem considering the wonky matchmaker.
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