StarDrive

StarDrive

Skip · Strategy · 2013

The verdict

SKIP IT.

The value isn't there at $29.99.

Length
19h
Value
$1.58/hr
Reviews
45% positive
Reviews or length hold it below the tiers even at a deep discount.
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Length
19h
main story (HowLongToBeat)
$/hr
$1.58
price ÷ main-story length
Price
$29.99
as of Sep 24
Reviews
45%
1,487 reviews, as of Sep 6
Metacritic
61
critic score
Players
350K
owners (estimate)
Released
2013

Minimum on the Steam store: 3 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900, 2 GB of storage. Windows only.

As a space bear, human or any other race, venture forth into the galaxy, create custom ships, conquer new worlds, build new colonies and defend your very existence against those who would take what is yours.
Description from the Steam store page.

What drives the score

How to read this

Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.

Holding it back
Value$1.58/hr
Price per hour of game. It moves the score inside the ceiling reviews set
Reviews45% positive
Gates the score. Weak reviews cap it, and nothing reaches BANGER without strong ones
For context
Length19 hours
How much game you get. Hours feed the value per dollar
Reach350K+ players
How many own it, a popularity + confidence signal
MonetizationNot known
No monetization record for this game, so nothing is assumed either way
Refunds1 of 152 reviews
Steam-purchase reviews sampled whose writer refunded the game. Nothing is docked

The value story

December 2023 is where it bottomed out, at $2.99. Its cuts run 80 percent off as a rule. There have been 70 in the 14 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart.

It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 99 percent. AI War: Fleet Command ($9.99, scores 62) outscores it, and so does Distant Worlds: Universe ($29.99, scores 26). Both sit among its closest neighbours.

Critics scored it 61, but players land 16 points lower at 45 percent. The reviews were kinder than the room.

Inside the two-hour refund window, 23 percent of the 126 reviews written there were positive, against 45 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.

Players

4 players at peak in the last day.

The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.

What players say

game crashes all the time instead of fixing the game dev decided to release stardrive 2. guy prob works for rockstar now.
Bone JesterNot recommendedafter 803hMar 2026Read on Steam
The base game itself was abandoned by dev and also lots of bugs and crashes. Then came the team doing the Blackbox mod and they did an amazing job to take the game further....BUT.... They made the game impossible to play because even on NORMAL difficulty its like playing a very hard level. The AI clearly cheats and just steam rolls you. You cannot stand against 1 AI nevermind 2 or more. I have no idea why they...
WollieGNot recommendedafter 1946hNov 2025Read on Steam
I got this game a very long time ago, and really liked the game mechanics, but the technical issues due to the game engine made it unplayable late game until 2 weeks ago. The recent Jupiter update of the Black Box mod swapped the entire engine and brought it to the modern age with a 64bit engine. This solved almost all the performance and crashes that the game had. The content added by the Combined Arms Mod really...
JudasRecommendedafter 326hMay 2026Read on Steam

Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.

No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).

Cite this score

Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.

BANG Score badge

The live badge. It shows the current score wherever it is embedded.

StarDrive scores 0/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/220660/stardrive
Embed the live badge

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<a href="https://steambangers.com/game/220660/stardrive"><img src="https://steambangers.com/api/badge/220660" alt="BANG Score" width="340" height="80"></a>
[![BANG Score](https://steambangers.com/api/badge/220660)](https://steambangers.com/game/220660/stardrive)

The BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.

Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 6, price as of Sep 24.

A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.

Critics vs players-16
Critics
61
Players
45
Critic darling, cooler with players. Read recent reviews before buying.
Metacritic critics · 1,487 Steam player reviews

Tags

Details

DeveloperZero Sum Games
GenreStrategy
Released2013