If you need to be told that the space fighter sim genre has fallen on hard times lately, you don't need to read this review. Either you need to go back and play some of the older games in the genre, or you're not interested and DarkStar One was never going to be a game for you.
For the rest of you who remain, Darkstar One starts with some promise. Space appears to be your oyster - you can travel in any direction, trade goods between systems, do missions and upgrade your ship to suit your tastes with a variety of weapons that suit your playstyle. You have various 'reputations' that you can max out to earn bonuses depending on the way of making money that you choose, and it is in your power to run afoul of the law by taking piracy missions or smuggling illegal goods for a few extra credits.
However, space is not your oyster. You may be able to upgrade your ship, but you cannot change it, and the differences in upgrades are not so severe as to cause your playstyle to ever vary significantly throughout the course game. Trading is rudimentary and also a pain in the ass - if you're attacked while carrying cargo, you have to jettison it or else suffer a huge turn speed penalty, and then waste time going back to pick it up when the fight is done. And your ability to travel space may appear non-linear, but is severely constrained by FTL drives that keep you in the right system for the amount of story progress you have achieved. Only occasional story missions that put you in trench runs or Descent style maps succeed in mixing up the formula, and in general these come off as misguided efforts at best.
Speaking of the story of DarkStar One, it's so bad that I'm not even sure what it is. Oh of course, I remember well enough how it started - I was hunting for whoever it was that sabotaged my father's ship and caused his death. Simple, right? But along the way I ended up so far afield of that mission doing irrelevant sidequests for ephemeral side characters that I completely lost the thread. I'm sure that wasn't helped by the fact that I had to tune out NPC dialogue to avoid ear bleeds caused by the piss-poor voice acting.
There is some joy in DarkStar One, don't get me wrong. If you ever held a fond place in your heart for space fighter sims, the actual space fighting is fairly enjoyable, if too easy, with responsive thruster controls and a variety of upgrades to deploy in battle in the rare cases when the game throws something at you you can't steer your way out of. And the addition of artifacts and pirate systems you can 'liberate' provide relaxing opportunities for exploration off the story's beaten path.
In the end though, DarkStar One doesn't do anything to advance the genre. It apes some of the more popular aspects of its predecessors and brings them to a modern presentation, but it manages to be less complex, more repetitive, and has a less interesting story than many of the games that came before it. It's difficult to see it as anything other than cynical a attempt to cash in on a niche market that might well drop money on anything that slightly resembles a Freespace 3 even if you have to squint really hard. Space fighter sims aren't dead to me, but it will take more than the weak spark that DarkStar One provided to revive them from their cardiac arrest.