30.4 hours played
Written 6 days ago
TL;DR - Fairly fun, if simple, arcade space simulator with some annoying flaws.
This game was my entry point into the Starpoint Gemini series. I had never played any of the games before, so I figured this was a decent place to begin. While the bones of a solid space RPG, 4X game are there, it gets to be a fair bit repetitive, especially in the campaign missions, mostly in some of the expansions.
In the campaign, you start out with a mid-size Frigate or Carrier (forgot which) and your squad gets ambushed by a mysterious foe. After rescuing the commander of an experimental vessel, you take on the role of the commander, who was in previous Starpoint Gemini games, it seems, and begin your mission anew. Given an old Gunship, you must work your way up to fielding the larger ships in the game: Battleships, Dreadnaughts, and Carriers. You start out with limited territory and you must expand outward capturing stations, researching technologies, doing salvage, mining, sending civilian fleets to do odd jobs around the sector, as well as trade with your neighbor factions. As the story develops, the campaign story itself is... fine. It's not great, not bad either.
Some of my biggest complaints about the game is that especially during the campaign they tell you to do something, but give you no indication how to do it. For example, you need to summon a giant ship that's supposed to help you conquer planets and it tells you that you need to lay a beacon for the ship to instantly teleport in. But they don't tell you how to do it. I was just aimlessly flying around fighting an infinite battle until I finally saw the outline of the ship placed in a random spot that wasn't obvious to see nor was the game indicating that's what needed to be done. When you use the ship during conquest, you have to sit and defend it against wave after wave of attack until it "charges" its weapon. It's just busy work and not really fun. You have to manually fire the weapon once it charges as well, which made no sense to me. It should be automatic, especially since the enemies keep coming until you do fire the weapon. There were a lot of missions where you have to kind of just guess how they want you to complete the mission because there's nothing that says how they want something done and there's nothing really guiding you on how to complete it. You may find yourself frequently getting stuck for a little while wondering how you are supposed to complete an objective.
I also feel the RNG is a little unbalanced. I had all the mainline upgrades for capturing ships (the privateer and negotiations sections) for my perks, but I could still barely get to 10-15% success rate for capturing ships that were similar sized as I was. If they were smaller, I could get 50% or higher, and they would still fail most of the time. It made capturing ships a boring, repetitive process that just really wasn't worth it. Most ships have biometric shielding anyway, which prevents transport, so it makes the whole operation moot. While boarding was a nice concept, it just wasn't implemented in a great way.
I haven't tried the freeroam or conquest modes yet, but I figure it would be the same as the campaign, just more "Choose Your Own Adventure". The empire management portion of the game is okay. It's simple enough to learn and grasp, and requires minimal micromanagement once it gets going. There's no real alert to when you're getting attacked (at least not in the campaign that I have found), so you just kind of have to monitor your sectors and make sure that you're not getting attacked by any enemies. Also how the devs chose to divide up the map was a little odd. Some places have several hexes of territory while others were only 2 hexes in size. There was no uniformity, some just had an outpost and a satellite link. Some were resource rich, others were mostly empty. There was no standardization of what you might find in a section you could conquer. No planetary invasion (other than using the big ship) was kind of a letdown, but I guess since you're always in a ship in space, it's fine. Everything else is finding a station or an output, fighting its garrison, and once it's destroyed, it's yours. Simple, but repetitive and can get a little old after a while.
In the campaign there's little room for diplomacy, so I don't know much about how that works. If you click on a station or a planet owned by a different faction, you can speak with their ambassador and it gives you limited options on what you can do: declare war, do a trade agreement, or do them a favor. Couldn't see diplomatic annexation, or vassalage, or complex diplomatic options, just basic options you can do.
I was also a little underwhelmed with the UI. The game gives a very bare-bones visual to start and you can turn on a "tactical view", which does help a bit, but the standard view is obstructive, so you have to zoom out so you can see the full tactical view. This removes a lot of the audio cues that you tend to get from being in closer, for no real reason, but I guess if you're looking for a quieter combat experience, this can be good. This definitely feels like it was made for a controller since the keys for keyboard and mouse are little awkward and all over the place. When you click the "Select Closest Target", the game oftentimes does NOT select the closest target and does not rotate through any options (including ones that may have moved closer) if you keep pressing the button. I'm not sure what logic they used to determine which target was "closest", but it is flawed to say the least.
The combat itself is decent. You pick a ship, pick from 3 light weapon types (lasers, plasma cannons, and railguns) and 3 heavy weapon types (missiles and two other types that are not coming to me right now) that fit into slots on the ship. Larger ships can have fighters that can engage in combat as well. There is no point defense system, so nothing really stops fighters or missiles from striking your ship. There is one consumable item that allows you to prevent incoming missiles/projectiles from hitting, but it has a long cooldown and heavy weapons have a pretty short cooldown before they can be fired again, which makes the item kind of silly to use, and maybe as a last-resort if you need to get away. It feels like it's not meant to be used in combat to assist in defense. A lot of the other consumable items also feel underwhelming and meant as a last-resort to keep you alive as you flee, not as a durable way to stay in the fight. Most of the items have little to no effect on larger ships, or at least it does not appear to show any. The combat seems to be more fun when it's a bunch of smaller ships against another gaggle of smaller ships. Once you bring the bigger ships to bear, it becomes more of a slog fest than a fun engagement.
Ship customization is a joke. You basically get to choose your loadout from a limited selection of weapon types, choose some enhancements, and you can add decals to the hull. Most of the hulls are so oddly shaped that the decals deform or duplicate. You can't change ship colors, can't change to have your faction have specific ship colors, and you can't even choose what types of ships your faction uses. They're just there and what you get is what you get. A large fun point for these space-style simulation games IS customizing your ship. The devs definitely dropped the ball on this.
I did have fun playing the game, until I got to the "Titans Return" portion of the campaign anyway. While it does have a lot of flaws that keep it from being great, it's still a fun game for those who may sweat at the prospect of playing a more complex space simulation like the X series. There's hours of fun to be had exploring the Gemini sector, getting into engagements, slowly conquering the sector piece by piece. It will be a grind, and without the more advanced portions of the empire management, it may feel a little hollow for some. Get it on sale.
