Between the Stars

Between the Stars puts you in the captain's chair of a space cruiser, handling real-time combat against enemy fleets while managing crew, ship upgrades, and a persistent RPG progression layer. The genre blend is ambitious: part space-sim, part action game, part light strategy. Isolated Games is reaching for something in the neighborhood of FTL crossed with a traditional space-opera RPG, and the vision is clear even when the execution stumbles. Your job is to defend civilized space from a faction called the Children, moving between sectors, picking up missions, and slowly building a more capable vessel. From a systems standpoint, the ship upgrade loop is the strongest part of the package. You slot weapons, manage subsystems, and make meaningful choices about whether to prioritize shields, firepower, or crew efficiency. If you like the feeling of a build coming together over several hours, that core loop holds up. Real-time combat has a tactical dimension too - positioning and target prioritization matter, and fights against larger enemy cruisers require actual attention rather than just holding a fire button. The RPG side adds crew skills and captain abilities that compound over a run, giving a satisfying sense of growth if you stick with it past the early hours. Here is where the spreadsheet reality sets in. The AI in combat encounters is inconsistent. Enemy behavior can swing between trivially passive and spike-damage brutal in ways that feel more like tuning problems than designed difficulty. The tutorial covers the basics but leaves some mid-game systems underdocumented, so expect a few hours of learning the hard way how fuel economy or boarding mechanics actually function. Players who read every tooltip carefully and enjoy self-directed discovery will adapt fine. Newcomers expecting a polished onboarding experience may bounce off before the good stuff surfaces. The mixed Steam review score reflects exactly this split: people who pushed through are largely positive, people who hit early friction walked away. The simulation and strategy tagging on the Steam page slightly oversells the depth. This is not a grand-strategy game and not a deep sim. Think of it as an action-RPG that happens to take place on a spaceship, with enough systemic layering to satisfy someone who wants more than a shooter but not enough to satisfy a dedicated 4X player. Mod support at time of writing is limited, which constrains long-term replayability. If the developer adds meaningful mod tools or content updates, the ceiling rises considerably. For now, the game sits comfortably in the "solid but unpolished" category, worth the time for space-game enthusiasts who can tolerate rough edges. Diego, Scout Team