As it stands, at major milestone alpha 3.0, Star Citizen does not convince as a game. But as a picture-postcard-maker - as a demonstration of technology - it's virtually peerless. 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 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. 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.
There are a handful of missions to run, but they're tepid and boring. One, for instance, is an off-the-books private investigation which, admirably, can go either way depending on the evidence you find. You are to search an eerily quiet, abandoned comms station to get to the truth. It sounds OK, doesn't it? But there's no excitement, just a few computer terminals and panels to interact with. No threat, no danger, just a mission to solve an insurance claim of all things. Then it bugged and I couldn't complete it as intended. It was all so typically Star Citizen.
Star Citizen remains a tantalising prospect, and a controversial one. Perhaps the solutions I am after are right around the corner, mere moments away. Perhaps the core is inches from completion and content will soon be piped in willy-nilly and with joyous abandon, and the dream realised. Or perhaps we will be here a year from now, still stewing over the same issues. I, like many others, was led to believe alpha 3.0 would be the turning point, but what I see is an ever-growing mountain to climb, and my hope wanes.
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