A look at Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows Review - PAGE 2

NorthStar

Tearing a page from Firefly and old-school spaceship trading games of the BBS days, Northstar starts off in the not-so-distant future. Thanks to a pack of aliens from a cold planet landing on Earth and trading tech for land to settle on (igloo prices went through the roof and Canada made a killing!), humanity has made it to the stars! Unfortunately, the aliens were too smart to share the inner workings of the technology so humans still don't know how to build or fix anything.

But, NorthStar isn't about the tech, it's about the story of a pilot who inherits his mom's beat-up old spare freighter after she vanishes in the depths of space. To keep the bird gassed as you try to find out what happened and what's really going on in the wilds of space, you pick up missions, flying cargo of a debatably legal nature and earning money you can use to upgrade your ship. You the pilot and the crew you hire also get to improve your skills with an RPG system. Not only does this affect ship combat, it also comes into play in the first-person parts of the game. First-person? Yup, if you have customs agents decide to check your ship, they actually come aboard and you get to sweat it out as you watch them wander by the panel with contraband tucked in behind. Good news though - you can shoot first.

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Fort Zombie

Dropping Northstar's RPG system into a zombie apocalypse, Fort Zombie tosses you into the role of one of the last survivors. At the end of your rope and sick of running, you hole up in a fort near a zombie infested town and hunker down to fight the shambling hordes. You get to choose the game's difficulty by picking your hideout (from schools to a prison) and setting up to fight zombie hordes all night long. During the day you're sneaking into town, looking for food, weapons and maybe even survivors to join your team - some of them even as fellow zombie-bashers. At night the dead walk and it's a battle to last until morning as the attacks get bigger and bigger each night until a final showdown pits you against the scariest thing since your grandma stopped shaving her beard.

So there's a look at what Kerberos Productions is up to - taking old skool game concepts and giving them new life with new technology, new stories, and applying the team's incredible attention to detail. We'll be bringing you more information about the latest developments from Kerberos Productions as we can. Like the contest we're about to run that's going to let three winners become part of Sword of the Stars!