StarRupture Early Access Review – Core Breach

The survival crafter genre is a tricky beast. When it’s done well, you’ve got instant classics like Minecraft or The Forest. When it’s done poorly, you end up with something like StarRupture. The good news is that it might be still become good, given that it’s entering Early Access. But only if developer Creepy Jar is willing to take a hard look at some of their assumptions.

StarRupture (originally titled Chimera when first announced) puts you in the role of a penal colonist on the world of Arcadia-7, orbiting a highly unstable star named Ruptura. Periodically, the star goes nova (not to be confused with a supernova), scouring the planet of all life that isn’t underground or protected by the latest in shielding technology like your bases. You and up to four people have been dumped on the planet for unspecified crimes and are expected to “work off” your sentence by mining raw materials, then shipping processed ore and manufactured materials back to Earth. Doing so allows you to unlock new structures and building components, which will allow you to fulfill more complicated orders as well as better equipping you to survive the planet.

Let’s get the gameplay elements of StarRupture out of the way first, because this is absolutely where the bulk of the work needs to go for the next year. Right now, there are some serious impediments to making this thing enjoyable. First, movement. Using a first-person perspective is perfectly fine, but there’s a world of difference between DOOM or Call of Duty and what StarRupture is positing. You want to have slide mechanics? OK. You want no fall damage? All righty. But a lack of an “auto-run” toggle? That’s a serious failure of basic awareness about the environment you’ve got players in. Since you are logistically compelled to be manually running raw materials and components between multiple bases until you can somehow manage to unlock the means to ship cargo automatically, putting a toggle to run automatically would help players in the simplest of ways. As it stands right now, repeated trips from Camp A to Camp B and back turns StarRupture into a wrist-breaker.

Further gameplay failures fall into the category of “information vacuum.” This is notionally a far future setting. There is literally no good reason not to have a compass as part of the UI to help players navigate. From there, it follows that there’s no reason not to have distance markers from your current position to a known point of interest, or to have that information supplied by the various “geo-scanners” which are laid up around the environment. It follows that we should be able to mark up the map to help us identify resources, chart safe routes, and otherwise help us move around. And it follows that we should be able to have an idea of the effective area of a Base Core before we plop it down so we can find a good balance between resource availability, defensibility, and building space for infrastructure. Handwave it away however you need to, but this is basic information which we genuinely need. In a similar vein, let us actually record all those memos and audio files we’re running across for furture perusal, when we’re not trying to outrun carnivorous bugs and vaporizing heat. I know I’d like to have been able to flip through and try to build more accurate timelines of what happened to all the dumb bastards who came before me.

Also contributing to the information vacuum is the rather hostile wildlife of Arcadia-7. There needs to be a threat detection system in place for everyday walking around. As it is right now, wildlife sits in one of two buckets: “I see those guys over there” and “SURPRISE!” There has got to be better ways to detect wildlife than just eyeballing them , and there has to be a consistent reason why certain creatures appear beyond “because screw you, that’s why!” We have to know what attracts them, what confuses them, and ways other than pulling the trigger till the gun goes “click” to deal with them. Yeah, we can always sit around and wait for the star to wipe everything out to buy ourselves a few minutes of peace, but even that’s information we can use and aren’t provided short of the warnings right beforehand. Give us a damned clock or something. That’d do more to build tension than a thousand ambushes from behind.

As far as the base building loops, I get the distinct feeling that you’re expected to build some truly complicated production lines and lots of them. Having a “passthrough” function for some of the later structures which require a mix of simple and complex parts would have been a boon. As it is, you’re going to be setting up a lot of different production lines for specific parts, and spending way too much time re-engineering them once you’ve unlocked new recipes and new structures. The one saving grace, such as it is, is the fact that tearing down structures refunds the complete material cost, as well as any resources the structure might have been holding. But the progression to unlock the structures that help you move cargo from Camp A to Camp B are so far down the tree and so filled with useless crap in between that it’s a punishing slog. I’m sure somebody thinks this is a “challenge.” And it is, in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. In the same vein, the process to upgrade Base Cores is the wrong sort of challenge: a gigantic resource sink, repeated over and over, and with a horde of critters flooding towards you to destroy all the effort you put in. Sure, as a solo player you can save and reload if things go sideways, but multiplayer likely will not have that particular option. Not that I’d want to subject other players to that particular activity. My idea of base defense was a “Great Wall of Guns,” establishing a line of turrets and loading them up fully with ammo before pushing the button. Yeah, it worked, but it didn’t feel particularly fun, or even necessarily satisfying.

My final complaints (really, I mean it!) regarding gameplay relates to two pieces of equipment which share a single and utterly obnoxious mechanic. In the early sections of the progression tree, you unlock the Health Kit and the Grenade. Using either device makes them unavailable to use again right away. That’s not the problem. The problem is that in order to make them available, you have to perform different tasks which fill up a meter; shooting enemies, picking plants, mining meteorites, activities that you’re going to be doing anyway but should not be tied to two pieces of gear which are decidedly important to your efforts. I suppose what’s especially frustrating is that Creepy Jar could have done this two completely different ways and both of them would have been a lot smoother for the player experience. The easy way would be a simple cooldown of the devices, maybe shortening that cooldown as you progress through their badly explained skill ranking system. The more complex but still mechanically consistent option would have been to have players derive different formulations of health serum to load up into the Health Kit or different compositions for the grenade from knockout gas to incendiary compounds to a fuel-air mix. We’re already having to do that with food and water (and not getting the equipment to produce the food and water products till further down the tree), this should have been a no-brainer.

After all that, one might think that I didn’t like a single thing about StarRupture. Not true! Visually speaking, it makes pretty good use of Unreal Engine for its environments, though it is absolutely a pig for resources. Particle effects are well implemented, organic shapes are nicely done, the transformations to the world from lush planet to scoured hellscape and back are very cleverly implemented. The UI was reasonably well made (what little there was), though the text for epistolary content was cramped and hard to read. Likewise, the numbers for incomplete resource contributions for research were hard to make out. Having the values in a pop-up when mousing over the resource would have been a better method of presentation. And as far as environmental warnings, equally cramped. Getting readable text should certainly be on somebody’s “to-do” list.

The audio in StarRupture is quite good. Lots of humming and clanking from the production lines, the roar of the planet being burned clean, rustling grasses and splashing sounds as you’re walking along, all of these are well handled. Voice acting is pretty good, though I will say I got real tired real fast with barks from picking up plants. The back and forth between your particular character (you have four to choose from) and the supervisory AI when you finish a contract or discover some new location or object of interest is pretty funny, though I would have liked a little more “internal monologue” from my chosen avatar as a way to reinforce how the character reacts to being all alone on a hostile world. And maybe their thoughts on why certain contracts are being fulfilled would have helped shed light on the larger universe.

StarRupture is going into Early Access, so there are features which may not have been implemented yet and refinements to the project which have not reached a point they can be applied. However, I don’t feel confident about this, especially since the conventions of the genre and the setting would strongly suggest that these are fundamental requirements for basic gameplay, not mere fripperies or extravagances which can dispensed with. I’m equally certain somebody will try to defend the myriad functionality omissions as a critique of capitalism (possibly with an added argument about the virtues of “restorative justice” and the evils of colonialism given the conceit of players creating their own cells in a penal colony). And that’s even less persuasive. The plain and simple fact is that there’s a lot of work which needs to be done to move the needle from “technically playable” to “reasonably enjoyable.” A year from now, when StarRupture is notionally slated to leave Early Access, it may be a considerably different game. At this particular moment, however, it’s not a game which I’d feel comfortable recommending to fans of the genre, let alone neophytes looking for a good first experience. We can only see where Creepy Jar goes from here, and hope they draw the right conclusions.

Axel reviewed StarRupture in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.