“Starbuck, what do you hear?” “Nothing but the rain.”Įach mission can be attempted on one of three different difficulty levels, and completing bonus objectives will earn you an in-game currency you can use to unlock better weapons and perks for your ships. Dying Sun also makes some aesthetic lifts from Battlestar, and the game’s vacuum-muted gunfire and pulsing taiko soundtrack frequently make me feel like Starbuck taking on the Cylon fleet. The Interceptor’s clearest sci-fi equivalent is the Colonial Viper Mk. It comes with a pair of changeable primary guns, a single-use heavy weapon for bombing runs and a “drift” ability that lets you kill your thrusters and continue on your current vector, re-aiming your guns without changing course. Your ship is a swift and nimble hunter-killer called an Interceptor. (You actually can stay and fight the flagship, too, if you’re feeling cocky.) Many of my most thrilling moments have involved wrapping up a mission objective while a flagship bears down on me, jumping out while under heavy fire. Assuming you’ve done what you came to do, you need to orient yourself toward a waypoint and do a light-speed jump to safety… after waiting for your hyperdrive to spool up, of course. No landing, no exploring, no boarding parties.Īfter a certain amount of mission time has passed, an enemy flagship will jump into your sector and deploy a raft of fighters and missile barrages in your general direction. In the end, however, it boils down to flying around and shooting things. Objectives vary from mission to mission – some have you escorting a friendly cruiser, others have you taking out a pair of shielded enemies and so on. But they’re designed to be replayed, and at their highest difficulties each one becomes a gnarly test of wits and skill. There are just 14 missions in the game, and on the easiest difficulty a player could blow through them in an hour or two. The higher the difficulty of the mission I attempted, the more I had to pause the game mid-fight and plan new strategies on the fly. Large, shielded dreadnoughts are easy to outrun, but do a good job of guarding more vulnerable targets. Unshielded fighters aren’t much of a threat on their own, but leave too many unattended and they can ruin your day. Enemies stack on top of each other effectively. Space combat in House of the Dying Sun is well-tuned and consistently enjoyable. This is not an easy game, but with each death you’ll learn something before being quickly thrown back into the action. It’s more in the vein of TIE Fighter and the other Lucasarts X-Wing games than something slower-moving and more considered like Elite: Dangerous. This is fast-moving, aggressive dogfighting against a variety of enemy ships. With the narrative at the margins, Dying Sun is freed up to focus on the main event: Space combat. It’s telling that the battlecruisers, transport ships and fighters you go up against are all coded blue on your heads-up display while you and your allies are coded red. In one mission, your targets are a pair of shuttles carrying the families of your enemies. When one of your targets ejects, you track their escape pod and blow it to dust. You’re not a hero by any stretch – you’re the iron fist of a fanatical regime. Missions are brief, brutal affairs in which you and your squadron murder everything in your sights. Dying Sun mostly gets its narrative elements out of the way so you can focus on flying, strategising and shooting. “Priestess Hara has been spotted training prototype drones in the Firelands. Missions have evocative names like “Slaughter at Tannhauser Gate” and “Vengeance at Ember Field”, and each one is accompanied by creepy flavour text. You’re basically a space assassin, and each mission gives you a new target. You have been charged with enacting justice upon all of the traitors who arranged his murder. There’s been a coup, and your emperor has been murdered. Kill them.” Slightly longer version: You’re a deadly fighter pilot who works as an executor for the imperial army in some remote space empire. The tale it tells is old as time: “Some people messed with you.
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