The player character is the sole remaining fighter pilot on the space station Aegis after its warp drive is influenced by aliens, ripping it into another dimension.

Starscape features a plotless skirmish mode and a difficulty level where save games are automatically updated to reflect the loss of ships.

The player must then mine resources to repair the Aegis, their own ship, and recover the dimension drive, which the Archnid broke into five pieces, hoping to reverse engineer the technology and use it to escape.

[citation needed] Most of the game time is spent in a top-down view as the player's ship fights off attackers and collects resources from asteroids and from some of the destroyed enemy vessels.

In addition to the aforementioned repairs, the Aegis can spend acquired resources on both researching and constructing new tools and weaponry, which require allotments of the station's limited manpower that in turn can be increased by finding and rescuing rare survivors in the action sequences.