Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock (PC) Review

Powel, the main character in this journey, gets the rudest awakening that a futuristic astronaut could possibly have… apart from a Xenomorph Facehugger's "kiss," that is. His spaceship is heading towards an unknown planet due to a strange gravitational anomaly that has already damaged a great portion of this unfortunate vessel, killing his co-worker in the process, and leaving his captain severely injured. The first-person perspective of this cut-scene makes it all personal, the visuals, while not ground-breaking, are very good, and, finally, the music is as wonderfully emotional as a theme from a big-screen sci-fi epic.

The intro is simple, yet very effective, but, unfortunately, it all goes downhill the moment the game begins, and the protagonist makes the mistake of opening his mouth to speak in a ridiculously indifferent tone for a man who has just crashed on an unknown world, with the corpse of his buddy a few steps in front of him - and wait to hear the music; a soothing, non-threatening tune, which would be perfect for a yoga class, not the setting of a sci-fi thriller.

This lack of a descent atmosphere is the first flaw of Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock. The characters, in particular, behave as if they don't even care about what's going on - in fact, Novak, the ship's captain, is confined in his seat by a metallic rod that has been thrust into his abdomen, and he is like "Oh, don't mind that, it's just a flesh wound." The Spartan visuals don't help either, since none of the few available scenes look dangerous or mysterious enough to keep gamers on their toes.

Powel must first salvage items to fix his spaceship, and then find and disable the cause of the gravitational distortion that got them into this mess. With the push of the radio button, Novak will inform him about his current task, but his tips tend to be very straightforward, telling the player the exact thing that must be done. Even worse, the puzzles themselves aren't exactly mind-bending enigmas, since most of them can be solved with little to no experimentation with the available items.

It is only near the end when things can get a tiny bit more challenging, but, unfortunately, most of the time everything is just a walk in the park. That's a real shame because the most common problems of the adventure genre have actually been avoided here, with none of the solutions being illogical, plus none of the puzzles requiring any tedious back-tracking.

The only annoyance comes from the protagonist's constant yammering, with everything getting a brief comment from him. A door gets opened? "I've opened the door." A battery is extracted? "I've extracted the battery," and so on…

The final nail in the coffin is the plot hole-ridden storyline, which feels more incomplete than mysterious. Just when things start to get more interesting, it all ends abruptly, and in a pretty anti-climactic way, leaving all the important questions completely unanswered, with not even a single clue left behind to let people draw their own conclusions, something that, along with the fact that this is nothing more than a one-to-two hour-long mission, completely destroys any reason to start a second play-through.