Star Control®: Origins

The best way to describe Star Control: Origins is familiar, but unimpressive. Initially it looks like Star Control 2 with a serious graphical overhaul. The alien dialogue screens are well animated / voiced, the combat felt familiar and responsive, the solar/planetary expeditions looked impressive, and the initial story arc seemed like it could be very interesting. However after playing for about 6 or so hours, I just find that it doesn't have the soul to keep me invested enough to continue playing: - Battles are repetitive, but OK - The dialogue / story at this point isn't that good and felt like like a generic story with similar themes / pacing to the original. - The solar / hyperspace exploration just feels unnecessarily slow, making me waste time without anything interesting to do. - Planetary exploration is beyond tedious and given that resource gathering / planet exploration is key to Star Control 2 like games, I don't know if this issue can be fixed. Every world is basically the same Spore-like planet with a slightly different texture, where you waste time driving / hopping around the same terrain features to pick up uninteresting resource icons and occasionally see one of the few critter models lumbering around. Planetary performance is also quite bad, where simple lightning / fire / fog effects can drop a 1080Ti into the 30fps range only to rebound to the 120 fps afterwards. I thought I might just be remembering SC2 too fondly, so I fired up UQM HD and actually had more fun with that. The exploration of systems/planets was faster and even though it is far simpler looking, I preferred the speed/ease of gathering resources with the top-down view. The combat is still fun and most importantly the story / writing was much more interesting. To be fair I planned to give around 2.5 stars, but unfortunately I can't and it feels more like a 2 star than it does a 3. I guess it is possible to be patched with additional content, but now it feels hollow.

I have extensively played the Star Control 2 freeware edition Ur-Quan Masters. I would rank that game among my most favorite titles. Combat was satisfying, the writing was simply wonderful, and the exploration seemed endless. For the most part, Origins almost matches these expectations, but comes up short. Combat in Origins starts out very satisfying with many diverse ships, opponents and weapon types. However, in late game basically all opponents end up in one of two categories. Trivially easy to defeat in one or two volleys with no chance to respond, or turning into bullet sponges with weapons that are near impossible to avoid. Most of the fleet ships you acquire become useless almost as soon as you get a couple of upgrades for your flagship, and with the amount of wrecks you find, you'll never have to buy any. When exploring the universe, it seems impressive at first. And for all accounts it is. However, there eventually comes a time when you stop finding things of interest. Much of the fascinating aspects of exploration are taken away by the manditory objectives that are given to you to go explore most of the galaxy, will little to be found on your own inititative. UQM had a ton of extra content that could only be found if the player wanted to explore on their own. Over all, I feel like the handholding hurt the exploration experience. On the other hand, the writing in this game is spot on. All the characters are distinct and wonderful. The voice acting was spot on. It was a joy to talk to everyone I could. Overall, I think the devs did a decent job bringing this universe back, particularly after the disaster of SC3. But it did not reach the level of the UQM. I think that there needed to be less handholding and more cool things to find in the galaxy without being prompted to go look for a manditory mission objective.

Being a fan of Star Control and The Ur-Quan Masters, I was delighted to see this game on Steam, as a preorder. The moment it came on Steam, I preordered it... What a mistake! Ignoring all the background drama with Stardock, this game is unbelievable bland! It's like they took the story of SC2 and remixed it. It's kinda like a poor man's mobile version of SC2. Music and artwork are fantastic. Most of the aliens are voice, most of the minor aliens are not. The game becomes a huge grind after a few hours, the map is a mess. Even though this game went through a beta, they only tested the ship battles in Beta. They could have corrected most of the bugs and flaws from the single player campaign if they allowed for the first few missions to be tested in Beta. Lots of minor bugs, bad designs, and unpolishedness bring this game down. The game is memory intensive and buggy. I have 16gb of memory and it uses 9gb, as well as a massive swapfile. It crashes when on planets.. I am hopeful that this will be patched but it should have been picked up in Beta. After being on GoG for many years, this is the first review that I felt that I had to write! As difficult as it is for me, I recommend that you avoid this game for now. As much as I wanted to buy this game, it's just too underdeveloped, buggy, and boring! Instead, download The Ur-Quan Masters and have a blast!

Well 70 hours later and I finished the main campaign. For the most part I really liked it. Star Control: Origins has a lot of personality (I recommend running out of fuel at least once), a good amount of humor, and a fair to good story. My only complaint is the combat can get old on a couple missions where you're in enemy territory and keep having to fight. So make sure your ship is speedy. I never played the originals, so I have nothing to compare it to except Escape Velocity (remember that gem?), but it's been a super companion to play along side my re-watching of Babylon 5. If you need some fun, easy going sci-fi in your life I recommend.