Developer:Positech Distributor: Real.com
Reviewed by KaCee on 1/3/00

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First Impressions:

To make sure it wasn't just me, I had my husband play the game. He tried at first to install it on his Mac in his Windows 98/Pentium emulator (Virtual PC). It would not run, and resulted in an illegal operation error. This was disconcerting, as other games such as Baldur's Gate, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Caesar III all ran fine, if a bit slowly. So he played Starlines on my computer, but found it so frustrating and awkward that he couldn't stand to play it for very long at all.

Graphics:

The graphics are nothing special. The main screen with the planets and so forth is nice enough to look at, but is certainly far from cutting-edge design. Some elements of the graphics are a bit annoying, such as how text overlaps on the main screen, making it difficult to read ship and/or planet names. Planet labels move as you scroll around the screen. I guess this is to prevent you from seeing a planet without its label. Unfortunately, as shown in one of the screen shots, it's easy enough to see a label without a planet. I spent a good while wondering where the heck Zog was, thinking it was so tiny I couldn't see it, until I realized the planet was just off screen.

There are two ways to move around the main screen: one is to click on the mini map, the other is to scroll at the sides of the screen as with most games. While the first method works fine, the second is impeded by apparently non-moveable other windows and controls, such as the timer bar and mini map. If you try to scroll where those items are, the screen simply does not move. Given that they are in corners, this can make map navigation a pain. It makes no sense: the message window actually does not limit map movement, so the programmers clearly knew how to make these controls invisible to the scrolling. They apparently just didn't bother.

Passengers and crew are represented by cute little head shots of various men, women, and aliens. The weird names appear to be androgynous, meaning that the head shots can be randomly matched. This is good in the sense that men and women have apparently equally random chances of being pilots, stewards, cargo hands, etc. However (as shown in some of the screenshots), since one photo might be representative of many people, it can be confusing when you're trying to select a particular staff member. More than once I hired someone new instead of sending already-hired crew members back to my ship from shore leave because I wasn't careful enough with the weird names and identical pictures.

The graphical interface is non-intuitive to Windows users. Scroll bars do not behave like Windows scroll bars. For example, you cannot click on the empty space below or above the bar to move it. You must click and drag it. If you drag too quickly, your pointer will outrun the bar and you'll have to go back and grab it again.

Tabs in the docking screen are badly ordered and sometimes redundant. For example, clicking the Crew tab on the bottom window brings up both the Crew section in that window and the Starport Bar in the middle window. This would lead to the conclusion that the tabs are linked, but they do not appear in the same order in their respective windows. In the middle window, the Bar comes first, then For Sale, which corresponds to Modules. In the lower window, Modules comes before Crew. Yes, this is nitpicking, but it indicates the general negligence that makes this interface less intuitive and the game that much harder to play. If you're spending more time reinventing your mental wheel than learning the strategy of the game, playing becomes tiresome more quickly. Compound this with the other errors, and it can be frustrating.

Sound/Music:

There is very little sound in this game. There are a few sounds for things like docking, refueling, etc., but they are incidental. There is some mind-numbingly repetitive music that you can turn down, but there is no off-switch. You can turn it down so you don't hear it at all, but if you quit the game and come back later, it will reset itself to its standard volume and you'll have to turn it down again.

Gameplay:

Scenario elements are totally randomized, so it might not actually be possible to finish an assignment. You may not have the crew and/or modules available to you soon enough to do what needs to be done. This is a bit sloppy, but I suppose it also provides the potential for infinite challenges. If not for the errors, I would have at least enjoyed trying to beat the tough random distributions of needed elements.

As it was, the errors actually prevented me from ever being able to complete a mission. Typos and other careless mistakes aside, this game has a crucial fault: the saved games were problematic and eventually failed. At first I was just annoyed that the game provided no warning that if you typed in a game name you had already used you would overwrite a previous game. Then I realized it was worse for not showing you a list of saved games when you went to save, so you might not even know what names you had already used.

I made a mistake in one game that illustrates another design flaw: I bought a new ship, but had no pilot for it, so I wanted to send my original ship to go pick up a pilot. The new ship, however, was stacked on top and I could not access my original ship at all without moving the new ship, and I couldn't move the new ship at all without a pilot. There wasn't even a way to get the pilot from the old ship to the new one.

So I tried to reload an old game to go pick up the additional pilot first. I saw that there were only five saved games on the load list, though I had saved more than five times. The games I had saved were called: 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2, and 2a. The list only included 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, and 2a. I didn't know if that meant that the fifth slot was automatically overwritten even if the name was changed, or if game 2 was lost somewhere. So I decided to test the saved game function by returning to the game and saving three times in a row, calling them game x, game y, and game z. I then went back to the load list, and none of the new saves were there.

I wondered if the game was maxing out at five slots (although it wasn't telling me there was a problem when I saved), so I deleted all of the games beginning with 1. I then went back and again saved games called game x, game y, and game z. When I checked the load list again, these new games still didn't appear, and only game 2a remained. Did this mean that deleting saved games was actually deleting the slots? I tried loading 2a and playing the game a bit more in case it required me to do something different to allow a new saved game. But I was never able to successfully save again. Game 2a remained as it was and was never overwritten, even when I tried calling a new saved game 2a again.

At this point, I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it, thinking I had killed the slots and a reinstall would bring them back. I started a new game, just played around without caring what I was doing, and saved at several points along the way. Only the first saved game ever appeared on the load list, and never changed even if I used its name repeatedly. In essence, I was no longer able to ever save a game. Given how easy it is to make mistakes, this made play impossible and I was never able to do it perfectly through in order to complete even the first mission. Furthermore, I couldn't leave the game to go do anything else, such as eat, sleep, leave home, etc. I could put it on pause indefinitely, but I found that doing so for long periods of time when my computer would go into sleep mode would often result in the game crashing with the illegal error Windows message.

Enjoyment:

I'm personally into trading games, so I found the challenge of deciding what kind of cargo to take, what kind of ship to build, and what routes to follow to be interesting. There is no combat in the game, so people who aren't into trade-only will be bored.

Of course, the bad interface and errors prevented me from being able to trade and build in an enjoyable way. Every time I thought I had it figured out another error would creep in. Once I could no longer save, a mistake meant restarting the entire game. Given that restarting meant re-randomizing all of the elements, it was a true restart without any benefit gained from the time played previously. Inevitably, another error would happen, either by my fault or the game's, and again there would be no saved game to fall back on.

Eventually, I got sick of wasting my time. I only continued to play because I'd agreed to do the review. Had I paid for this game, I'd have demanded my money back by the end of the first few hours. At the time of writing this review, the Real.com purchase listing is offering a money-back guarantee. I suspect they might just get a lot of people taking them up on that. Frankly, the game isn't worth almost $20 (US) anyway, even aside from the errors. If this game ran more smoothly I'd rank it with general shareware-type games, which are often considerably cheaper than that. As it is, with the errors, it shouldn't even be considered a release version at all.

Multiplayer:

None. It could lend itself to multiplay in terms of a race to achieve the goals, but there isn't even a hint of multiplayer availability.

Overall Impression:

With a lot of reprogramming of the interface, error correction, bug fixes, and polishing, this could be a decent and enjoyable little game. As it stands, it doesn't appear to have gone through any reasonable amount of quality assurance or user testing. The whole thing is characterized by sloppiness. In fact, even the web site is littered with typographical errors. The people at Positech need to clean up their act if they plan to produce anything other than low-grade shareware-style games.

The marketing of this game (in both the email to me and on the web site) position it alongside Roller Coaster Tycoon, SimCity, and Age of Empires. I've played all three of those games, and even reviewed Roller Coaster Tycoon. Roller Coaster Tycoon had problems, but even at its worst it far surpasses Starlines Inc. The original SimCity of years ago was significantly more polished than Starlines Inc. Age of Empires is real-time strategy and bears absolutely no resemblance to Starlines Inc. Other than the fact that everything mentioned is a computer game that might have some aspect of strategic thought involved, the comparisons are utter nonsense. There is nothing in Starlines that resembles any of the games mentioned. The closest comparison I know of is the text-based BBS game Planets, which was a better quality game despite being low-tech.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

None that I am aware of. The male and female head shots are randomized, so women have an equally random chance of being portrayed as pilots, engineers, etc.