Star Control III

Played and finished this one on Dos years ago. The game is a mixed bag. More adventure than space exploration or strategy, the cartoonish settings and development isn't very well integrated with the mood of the story of the scope of the game. Add very stupid battle mechanics and you will have a mediocre game.

I had a lot of fun with this game. I stopped playing when I noticed how badly derivative the narrative was. The characters you meet recall the story of SC2 in a way that shows very bad writing skills. It feels as if I were doing a SC2 remake and rewriting the story with my own words. Since I hadn't finished SC2 by then, I decided not to get the spoilers this way. I'd rather try to finish SC2 first, and the references wouldn't bother me anymore.

At least in the versions I've played, this game was always a little bit buggy. And it's undeniable that SC2 was one of the greatest games ever created (possibly only the Civ series has taken up more of my life than SC2, and that's up to 7 games so far, counting Call to Power and Alpha Centauri). That said, this is a fantastic game, with a good plot, neat ships, and some fantastic tweaks to the original system. Well worth the time!

...because it is one. This is not by the original developers, and it shows. The character of the game is entirely different from the previous two. I seem to recall accidentally getting two species to wipe each other out in SC2. In SC3, you've got some "galactic United Nations" thing going where you can't even kill aliens without it *ending the game* (as opposed to, say, a strongly worded letter a real one might offer). Not to mention HAL and sock puppets.

While the game by itself is more or less OK, it killed off the story arc of Star Control series. You would be better off playing Star Control 2, and pretend that this game does not exist.