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Star Citizen is a bit like an Instagram account: what you see looks amazing but the reality is hollow. As it stands, at major milestone alpha 3.0, Star Citizen does not convince as a game. But as a picture-postcard-maker - as a demonstration of technology - it's virtually peerless. Standing on top of a canyon on a dusty, windswept planet, looking up at the suns and moons in the sky and knowing you can fly up to them is hair-raisingly cool. Knowing when night comes it's because of the rotations and orbits of those same planets, of those same stars, is an awesome feeling. And even though there might only be a handful of planets to touch down on (for now), they are truly massive, taking probable hours to fly around. It's a simulation of the highest detail and largest proportions. But once you've seen the eye-popping sights, once you've flown down from space onto a planet and then back up again - once you've seen the beautiful Blade Runner hubs with their rebellious posters on murky walls and flickering neon lights - there's little to do. You can buy fancy-looking guns, you can even buy a great big railgun, which charges up and then very satisfyingly unloads, but there's nothing to kill.
Likewise, you can buy various suits of armour off mannequins in shops - one of the game's many lovely flourishes of detail - but there's no real need to other than to look cool, other than to pose for screenshots. Most shops don't have any interactive stock and so, like the hubs and the universe around them, they contribute to the feeling of touring a giant Hollywood set: all front and no substance.
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