The gameplay of StarFury is modeled after the "become a captain and chart your own destiny" style of Freelancer. You start the game with a basic ship, and while she’s not much to look at, she’ll get your career as a new Lieutenant set on course. Arriving at a local starbase, you’re given the basic pitch from command that you’re to infiltrate the pirate clans that are causing havoc within the shipping lanes. However, this isn’t a simple "go and finish it now" sort of mission, rather, it’s the overall goal of the game, and you’re told that it doesn’t matter how you get there, it’s just that you do get there that’s important. This means pure open-ended gameplay at its finest. Want to be a merchant and spend several game-years hauling freight and outrunning pirates? Go for it. Feel the need to be a pirate yourself? Great, go ahead and give it a shot. There’s no limit to what you can do, heck, you can ignore the entire storyline if you like (though you’ll feel pretty aimless if you do.)

Once you launch out of stardock, it’s time to start exploring. You ship is easily controlled from the keyboard, with simple keystrokes to increase/decrease engine power in ¼ increments and maneuver your bird left and right. StarFury completely ignores the third dimension, so there’s no rising or diving with your ship; just point it in a direction and go. A simplified HUD allows you to quickly flip through your local and long range maps, examine your crew, check your mission list and examine your ship’s status.

Combat, if you’re brave enough to get involved in it early on, is as simple as the navigation system. You just choose what weapons bank to fire, line up the enemy within the bank’s firing arc, and press fire. Through a combination of luck, maneuvering, weapons knowledge and a hopefully good crew, you’ll start tearing up the enemy’s shields. Weapon damage is very similar to that of Star Fleet Battles, with weapons first chewing away at the facing shield, then burning through armor and finally doing internal damage. A quick round of combat is unheard of in StarFury, as you’ll play an extended game of cat and mouse, trying to trick your opponent into showing you his weakened shields as you protect yours. Once the internal damage appears, it’s all over but the crying.

A space combat RPG isn’t much fun if you can’t customize your ship or buy new ones, and the makers of StarFury have made sure you’ve got plenty of options for your ship(s). Every little detail can be tweaked, from armor types (there are six) to the engines and weapons. There are over 26 weapons alone, each having basic damage ratings, and some are packed with all sorts of fun bonus effects. Take the Toxic Injector for example; once it punches through the target’s armor, it fills it with poison gas, killing off valuable crewmembers in the process. And what ship would be complete without the Psychic Flailer, a lovely piece of kit that stuns the crew, then kills them off by attacking their minds. If you’re into more "conventional" weapons, you can always purchase the lovely ripper beam, which fillets enemy ships into little strips of metal, turning the target into a dinner entrée.

When you tire of your main ship, there are plenty of options for purchasing others. Once you have enough cash, you can head over to a friendly starbase and shop for some bigger toys, including cruisers, carriers, battleships and battle cruisers. There’s nothing like patrolling the space lanes in a Terran battleship to make you feel like a big man in the galaxy.

Lest you think that StarFury is all about fighting, Malfador has made sure there are plenty of jobs for you to do, thus giving you a reason to keep on playing the game. Once planet side (or visiting a stardock) you can pick up missions from the three main guilds. The merchant guild offers jobs that mostly involve running cargo, both legal and illegal, between planets, while the mercenary guild will have you running with the best bounty hunters around looking for criminals. Of course there’s the pirate guild, those nasty beggars you’ve been tasked with infiltrating. Sign up with them and you’ll find yourself hunting down those clueless merchant ships, scoring cash, and stealing cargo in the process.

StarFury’s gameplay boils down to one long open-ended adventure in space. You’ve got combat rules that are styled around Star Fleet Battles (they even have a few weapons that sound awful familiar) mixed with a freewheeling RPG that loosely resembles that of Freelancer, so it’s the best of both worlds.

When it comes to the visuals, StarFury’s are functional, and maybe a hair above average. Most of the models look good, but are by no means spectacular. For anyone who’s played the Star Fleet Battles titles, you'll recognize Terran ships as knockoffs of the Gorn, Abbidons as Lyrans and the Amonkrie ships as the Hydrans. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let’s just say the ship models are pretty cool looking, though their color palette is pretty drab. Drab actually defines most of the game's visual feel; as the StarFury universe is a dark one, with plenty of gray, brown and black. There are, however, a few moments of graphical inspiration, including the nebulae, which look great, or the flame spouts that appear as a ship starts to take heavy damage.

Sound is only so-so in the game. There’s a decent soundtrack, which actually changes as you jump into new star systems. The problem is, with the slow pace of the game, you can get really tired of hearing that music as you prowl the space lanes of one system for an hour or more at a time. There’s no voice work so to speak, it’s all textual messaging, and the combat sounds are pretty average.

While StarFury starts out pretty slow, with its focus on building up your ship by doing miscellaneous jobs, it does pick up as time goes by. Once you start building better ships and getting involved in more heated combat, you’ll find yourself having a hard time hitting the "quit" button. Being that the game is so open-ended, you can always run missions for the pirates, which introduces a "bad guy" element to the gameplay and helps keep things fresh.

For gamers who want a space-based RPG that’s smack dab in the middle of both genres and isn’t all that complex, I’d suggest taking a look at Space Empires: StarFury. If you’re a deep simulation fan, or an RPG zealot, however, you’ll probably find this game a little simplistic. For the average player, I think StarFury might be a bit too niche for more than a dozen or so hours of gameplay. Personally, I really enjoyed it, and am still playing it whenever I get a chance, just because I love how closely it resembles Star Fleet Battles.