Imagine that you are a prisoner. Instead of sitting in a gloomy cell, however, you are sent to a distant planet. There, you must work endlessly for a megacorporation while enduring attacks from alien spiders and beetles. Welcome to your new home in StarRupture.
The creators of Green Hell, the Polish studio Creepy Jar, have unveiled their most ambitious game yet: the sci-fi project StarRupture. This game offers a first-person view and sends players to a distant planet to survive.
Currently available on Steam Early Access, StarRupture is a cooperative survival game. Unlike Green Hell, which sold over 6 million copies, StarRupture takes players into space. Rather than surviving alone in the jungle, players must survive on a distant planet, build automated bases, manage resources, and battle alien threats. Players can expect a combination of strategy, shooter, and science fiction elements with economics and production chains.
Set in a dystopian future, StarRupture is a game in which governments send even petty criminals to alien worlds to work for corporations. You are one of these expendable resources, sent to the hostile planet Arcadia-7 to explore and extract valuable minerals on behalf of Earth’s megacorporations. Arcadia-7 resembles a science fiction tourist brochure’s idea of a planet: it is beautiful and deadly, harsh and colorful, full of potential and danger in equal measure.
First, there’s a huge, beautiful open world where players will serve their harsh but beautiful punishment. It has everything from lush vegetation to sulfuric hot springs.
Arcadia-7 also appears to have a dark history. Clues in the environment, such as abandoned buildings and hidden secrets, provide players with information about the planet’s former inhabitants and the events that led to their demise. Previews from StarRapture’s numerous development updates on Steam and the game’s website showcase extensive automation similar to Satisfactory, mixed with first-person exploration, resource gathering, and brutal combat against hordes of crustacean- and beetle-like alien enemies inhabiting the planet.
In addition to the hostile local fauna, Arcadia-7 itself tries to kill you with periodic waves of fire from the star Rupture. This fire burns and sends a huge number of asteroids into all living things, forcing life to start over.
One of StarRapture’s obvious advantages is Arcadia-7 itself. This complex, fully explorable open world is a collection of Earth-like biomes and extraterrestrial spaces. The vegetation here is abundant, but much of it is deadly. There are also vast underground spaces and the ruins of long-abandoned bases to explore.
If you hope to regain your freedom, your task is to do whatever your corporate masters ask of you. Typically, this involves extracting and processing Arcadia-7’s abundant mineral reserves and, occasionally, chemical raw materials. This requires an increasingly complex cycle of construction work. You must build habitats, power sources, extractors, and launchers to send products into space. Then, you return to your computer and accept the next contract.
If you’ve played games like Satisfactory, StarRupture will be familiar to you. Each task is broken down into subtasks and stages of resource gathering and construction. Many potential tasks in StarRupture are automated or simplified, allowing you to focus on the big picture and the creative chaos of construction. However, I should mention that after playing Satisfactory for over 300 hours, switching to this game was difficult. StarRupture shines in areas where Satisfactory will blind you. However, I’m not saying that Satisfactory is a perfect game. It also started in early access in March 2019 and didn’t reach full release until 2024. With the right approach, StarRupture has time to become a memorable and praised game in the future.
To avoid empty words, I will point out the exact problems at the playtest stage. It’s pointless to pay attention to performance issues because this is a new game engine for the developers — UE5 — and Green Hell used Unity. Also, this is an early stage of the game’s development, so performance is not a factor. At this stage, however, the open world is pleasant and understandable. The grass blooms and burns at certain moments. An area for future exploration is visible on the horizon, as well as mountains in the distance. There is a resource there, and on the other side, there are monster spiders running around, which means there must be something valuable there. There are no questions about the open world.
Now, we will move on to the second important part of the process. After the open world and performance comes the most important part: construction, optimization, and resource gathering, where the plot of the game is tied in. Unfortunately, construction is not enjoyable at this stage of the game because it takes too much time to get used to it from Satisfactory. There are no hotkeys to avoid going into the construction menu every time. Construction itself is not convenient yet; there is no alignment by row or height. You can’t quickly demolish several buildings, nor can you see how much a particular machine is producing. You can only watch the conveyor belts. Currently, only three resources are available for extraction. However, this is early access and only the first release of the game, so only time will tell what will happen.
Considering all the circumstances, the planet we are stuck on is quite an inhospitable place. The game has a survival element, so you need to keep track of your hunger, thirst, and injuries.
Most injuries result from attacks by the planet’s insect-like creatures, which range in size from small beetles to creatures the size of bosses. However, you are not defenseless. StarRupture allows you to create and customize a variety of weapons.
The most entertaining part of StarRupture, though, is the multiplayer mode. You can work with others to build and fight. Logically, you can be much more productive when you and others jointly build satellite factories and distribute the load. During attacks by alien hordes, having reinforcements is also useful. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to try this part of the game during the playtest.
Thanks to Unreal Engine 5’s brilliant graphics, StarRupture looks pretty cool as it prepares for its early access release. The soundtrack is mostly ambient and synthesizer-heavy, while the environmental and factory sounds are minimal.
The game has a lot of voiced dialogue and strives to combine seriousness with sarcastic humor, though it is not always successful. Overall, StarRupture’s tone and appearance are slightly more austere and down-to-earth than Satisfactory’s.
Creating intricate networks of machines in games like StarRupture and watching them work is undoubtedly enjoyable, as is exploring new spaces and finding the treasures they hide. StarRupture has this same calm rhythm, but it adds a touch of mystery and danger to keep things interesting. Although StarRupture is still in its early stages, it has great potential and a solid foundation.
However, a full assessment of the game’s potential requires waiting for its release and more detailed information from the developers, including details about their experience and previous projects. Stay tuned for updates and news about StarRupture to learn more.
