Midway through a boarding action on a derelict refinery, I cut power to a section of deck, watched gravity fail, and had my engineer kick off the far wall to land behind a pair of enemy gunners who had been safely dug in a moment before. It is the kind of move most tactics games would never allow, and Starfall Tactics is built around it.
Up is a direction
Ninth Orbit’s debut puts you in command of the colony carrier Perennial, stranded in a graveyard of abandoned stations after a jump accident. Missions are boarding actions into those wrecks, and they play out on grids that can rotate, lose power, and lose atmosphere. In zero-g sections, units push off walls and ceilings, and cover is directional in three dimensions; an enemy safe from the front might be completely exposed from above.
It sounds complicated, and it takes a few missions to click, but the interface does a solid job of showing lines of sight and landing points. Once it does click, battles become wonderfully improvisational. Venting a room to space to pull enemies out of cover never stopped being satisfying, even after I realized the AI is wise to the trick on harder difficulties. Squad members fall into five classes, from breachers who cut new doorways to riggers who can restore power or deliberately kill it, and the best missions demand that you combine them in ways the briefing never spells out. Injuries persist between missions unless treated in the carrier’s medbay, which ties the tactical layer to the strategic one in a way that makes every squad member matter.
Running on fumes
That strategic layer is the game’s biggest weakness. Fuel, parts, and medical supplies are scarce by design, and the opening hours are tense in a good way. But the midgame, roughly hours twelve through twenty-five, asks you to grind similar salvage missions to stay afloat, and a couple of bad outcomes can leave you in a hole that takes hours to dig out of. Standard difficulty felt more like hard; I would suggest new players start on the lowest setting, which is still challenging.
Command, we are breathing borrowed air. Make the next one count.
In-game dialogue, Chief Engineer Osei
The camera also struggles in tight zero-g spaces, occasionally clipping into bulkheads or hiding a unit behind a support beam. Free-rotation helps, but it is fiddly with a controller. Mission variety in the back half helps a little, with rescue operations and timed evacuations that change the rhythm, but they arrive later than they should.
Performance and options
On PC, the game ran smoothly throughout my review, with turn processing quick even on large maps. Accessibility options include adjustable text size, color-blind presets for cover indicators, an undo for movement, and an option to disable the ironman autosave on any campaign.
Starfall Tactics is a game I admire more than I always enjoyed. If you love the genre and want a genuinely new idea to wrestle with, its zero-g battles are worth the occasional slog.
