DarkOrbit (and DarkOrbit Reloaded) is an online 2D MMORPG Flash game by Bigpoint set in space. Various types of NPC aliens and players can be killed to obtain two different types of currency, which can then be spent on upgrades to your ship.
This game provides examples of:
- Aliens Are Bastards:
- None of the alien races are ever given sympathy, or even any backstory besides "they're Always Chaotic Evil and messing with our mining ops, kill them!"
- Subverted in the case of the Kristallon and Streuners. Streuners will ignore the player unless attacked, while the lore for the Kristallon Emperor reveals that the Kristallon were originally indifferent to humans until they started destroying them for the Uridium they drop.
- Anti-Grinding: Leveling up gives you little, and you'll probably get all the levels you need while Money Grinding.
- Attack Drone: A key component of upgrading your firepower (or defenses; they can also carry shields). All serious players have a swarm.
- Beam Spam:
- Depending on your definition of "spam", some enemies may or may not do this, as may the players themselves. The Devolariums are particularly notable for large amounts of visual firepower. However, the visual attacks make no difference to the damage received.
- Also, the Rapid Salvo Battery supposedly does this in-universe, especially judging by its SFX, although in gameplay its actual effect is to change the colour of your Energy Weapons and massively increase your damage.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: Spending real money allows you to purchase the premium currency Uridium, necessary for most non-basic upgrades (but also available through gameplay).
- Critical Existence Failure: Your ship either blows up or is fully functional, even when getting hit with no shields.
- Energy Weapon: Your ship's main method of attack.
- Evolutionary Retcon: Most enemies and some ships have gotten this at some point, some repeatedly.
- Excuse Plot: Humanity has left Earth and colonized the stars, but needs resources. Three mining companies have formed. They can't get along. Here's your ship. Join one of the companies and kill everybody not in it, as well as those pesky Always Chaotic Evil aliens trying to stop our mining.
- Flying Saucer: A couple of different aliens have aspects of this, most notably the Mordons and Devolariums.
- Homing Boulders: Downplayed with the rockets, which have a legitimate excuse to track (being homing missiles and all) but seem to completely disable their guidance systems and just fly in a straight line if the celestial dice say they should miss.
- Homing Projectile: Hellstorm and Regular rockets.
- Low-Level Advantage: Players too powerful get reduced rewards in the first, completely PvP-safe map.
- Money Grinding: The main way to upgrade your ship, which increases your capabilities.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Downplayed. The Hellstorm Launcher lets you launch 5 (3 with the seldom-used weaker version) missiles at a time, from a spaceship that can normally only launch one at a time.
- Player Versus Environment: Killing aliens for fun and profit. Mostly profit.
- Player Versus Player: A large part of the game, and almost unrestricted. Can be very frustrating when the other guy is powerful enough to kill you in a few hits - AND faster than you. AND you want nothing to do with them.
- Regenerating Shield, Static Health: You can, however, fairly easily repair yourself with a repair bot.
- Roboteching: Hellstorm missiles do this, regular rockets don't.
- Stance System: You can have two different equipment configurations for your ship, and can switch them every five seconds.
- Tim Taylor Technology: Supposedly, cramming more power into the cells for your laser weapons multiplies their damage, rather than, say, overloading and/or burning them out.
- Too Awesome to Use: Certain insanely powerful ammunition is also incredibly expensive. Also enforced by having some forms of ammunition only available at certain times in the shop.
- Units Not to Scale: The player's ship seems to be a space fighter, although the scale is unclear. Is the Goliath the size of a house, a skyscraper, or a city? The Phoenix seems to be only big enough for the pilot, a laser weapon, an engine, and some other assorted hardware, which would put it at the size of a (large) car. Based on the scale between it and the Goliath, as well as the size of the Goliath's (possible) cockpit, the Goliath would be somewhat larger than a (large) house. But then, since when have games like this ever had sensible scaling?
