Into The Stars Soundtrack Review: This is a review of the video game score Into The Stars by Jack Wall.
Buy the score here (if available)
At a glance:
Geek Score: 84.4
Total Minutes Of Excellence: 11.1
Album Excellence: 26.5%
How are the scores calculated and what does it mean?
Into the Stars is a space simulator video game developed by Fugitive Games, a development team made up of former EA DICE and Spark Unlimited developers, and published by Iceberg Interactive. Following a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, the game was greenlit and went into the Steam Early Access program. The goal of the Into the Stars is to reach the planet of Titus Nova, with one large “capital” spaceship and a limited amount of supplies. In order to achieve this the player must visit other planets to gather resources, negotiate with alien species, and attempt to escape the pursuit of an enemy threat known as the Skorn. Fugitive Games cited The Oregon Trail and FTL: Faster Than Light among their inspirations for the game. The score is composed by Jack Wall.
You might know Jack Wall from the Mass Effect series, at least that’s where I remember him from and fondly at that. I am curious about this one. It says FTL is an inspiration and the score for that wasn’t bad. I’m thinking this could be a similar affair. Well, maybe not FTL. The opening cue ‘Into The Stars’ put an end to that. It’s a much more epic sounding or rather “big” sounding feel over this. The theme is really good though, I love the dreamy feel over it after the bombastic opening. It definitely have a nice science fiction feel to it. ‘A Mission For All Humanity’ is a more serious darker affair, but I feel we’re moving along in a nice progression here. The music is definitely enjoyable and part of a bigger universe. ‘What Lies Ahead’ cements the feeling of space exploration for me. I don’t know if space exploration has a sound, but it sure feels like this is the perfect sound for it.
The perfect space exploration sound is great, but it’s much better in context than it is to listen to it on album. It’s not designed to be great on album to be fair, but that happens to be my favourite way of exploring and listening to scores. This score does it’s job remarkably well, but there’s very little for us “album” listeners in terms of something extra or something slightly different. Although to be fair, in the second half there’s cues like ‘Celestial Ocean’, ‘Dig Deep’ and ‘Nowhere To Hide’ which isn’t all about exploration. I like the way it sounds, I just don’t love all of it and that’s perfectly fine. By the way, this would be a great score to play those classic DOS 4x space strategy games because they didn’t have that much sound at all. This score intrigues me though, and something I want to play based on the music alone.
HIGHLIGHTS:
1. Into The Stars
10. Celestial Ocean
11. Dig Deep
18. Titus Nova