Had a friend ask me how Dead Star is. My answer ran so long I decided to post it here. Apologies in advance for the rough post. I have to be at work in 2 minutes.

Dead Star is available on PC and PS4 and there is cross-system play (which you can disable if you only want to play with folks on your platform).

Here’s my answer to my friend’s question of how it is, and what it is:

To answer your question about Dead Star, it’s a competitive twin-stick space shooter with some MOBA elements.

I think everything has a different definition of MOBA though. Here everyone starts at level 1 at the start of the match and you gain experience by gathering and delivering ore to space stations, by taking over enemy and neutral stations, or by combat.

Each match takes place on a map with a handful of hexagonal space sectors, each sector has a space station. Each team starts with 1 station and the rest are neutral. You take over a station by destroying its defenses and then hanging out near it while a timer counts down. Delivering ore to a station you control will level it up and improve its defenses. You win by occupying all the stations that border your enemy’s home sector. Once you occuWhen this happens it starts the count down of a giant space cannon that eventually destroys the enemy’s home base. You can win by destroying it manually too but I’ve never seen that happen.

There are 3 classes of ship (a fast and weak scout which has a bonus when it comes to taking over a station, a slow but powerful frigate, and an in-between class that carries more ore than the other classes) and ‘brands’ of ship to pick from. You can take a selection of any 3 ships into a match and can spawn in on any of the 3 when you die.

At the end of the match you get components that you can use to augment your ships; I’m still figuring that bit out. And you level up as well. I’m up to level 5 I think. And I think max is 15. I don’t think levels have any direct bearing on your gameplay; they just indicate how long you’ve been playing and collecting components to augment your ships with.

There are 5v5 and 10v10 matches, I’ve only ever had the smaller ones spawn and they take 15-20 minutes most of the time.

I like it, but my only issue is most battles seem pre-determined pretty early. If you screw up at the start of the match it seems to be hard to catch up, and of course if you have people on your team doing something dumb, forget it. Like one match I had a guy who seemed to think he was on the other team and he kept attacking his own team (there’s no team killing so he wasn’t doing any damage, but he wasn’t helping either).

Anyway, it’s free for PS+ and it’s a quick download. You should check it out.