'Blaster Practice'

The following story mission is: ‘Baiting Sentinels’

Once you have created a new account for one of the Pirate Galaxy partners you go to the Starbase Tutorial which is nice and easy. If you are just creating a pilot on a new server within the same account, then you start here.

A whole new game to explore

You are welcomed by Bill Darius who looks like a middle-aged Wolverine, sort of the ultimate in cool uncles. He leads you off to find some Mantis Drones and invites you to start blasting. It takes about three shots to finish one off, and after killing 4 or 5 you go up to level 2. ‘Fantastic, this game is easy’ you think. Now you get access to the Tactical Map. I love how these early levels open new gadgets for you to play with.

After hitting level 2 you get invited to follow Bill to another area where you can kill a few scouts. You could stay and keep killing drones if you want, which earns you experience but your mission % does not increase. After blasting 3 or 4 scouts Bill decides you’ve done enough and leads you back to mine central. Presumably you could stay and keep killing if you want to, clocking up experience.

Back at mine central you are now told how to select orbit on the nav-comp. You’d think they would introduce you to the hot keys as they go along (F6 to get to orbit) and I don’t know why they don’t. So then you’re up into orbit and get to see the first of Pirate Galaxy’s beautiful orbital views. When I first played PG the orbital views were one of the things that impressed me most about the game. They’d make a great screen saver now I think about it.

The mission is over but in orbit you still get instruction on how to open the mission bulletin board. There are no white missions available, only the story mission ‘Baiting Sentinels’. You can’t visit the hangar yet or access interplanetary travel so you may as well accept and get on with it. As you don’t have a repair droid yet it would be a bad idea to try anything more hazardous at the moment.

As I said, this is really a tutorial but it eases you into combat while also introducing you to the mission structure of the game, nicely done.

If you want a step-by-step walkthrough of this mission, visit the official wiki.