Star Control®: Origins

Viewed in isolation, Star Control Origins is a fun galactic romp, an exploration RPG with the standard-ish heroic faire. Emulates the form of Star Control 2 : The UrQuan Masters. Here's how SC:Origins compares to it: +Better graphics +Well executed alien races. Familiar but not repetitive +Fixed the combat to hyperspace death spiral +Improved combat arenas, presentation, controls, and an option to let the computer fight for you. +More interesting hyperspace travel, allowing sneak peaks into solar systems so the player isn't making exploratory choices as blindly. +Generally less prominent 'seams' between modes of play. -The dangers of exploration have *all* been substantially eased back. To the point of being ignorable.* -The resource budget is extremely generous. Almost ignorable. -The combat AI is prone to taking the tactical approach most likely to see it's ship destroyed without inflicting any damage (ranged units maintain point-blank distance with flamethrower enemies, spinning in a corner of the map without firing a shot, etc). Not always, not infrequently. -There's no longer a mid-flight escape option. Fleeing can only be done after a ship is destroyed. That's a whole cost analysis minigame removed. In summation, SC:O is well made and well polished, fine moment to moment, but not any challenge. There's no scrappy underdog feeling. It hits the beats of SC2 but missed the fulfillment of hardships overcome. It's 2012 X-Com. If you loved 1994, you see what's missing. Maybe you have room for both? * The "violent overlord" race is less competent in a fight, fuel is a joke, replacement landers cost pennies, the aliens are placed in the galaxy in the most human-friendly way possible, the...thing...that happens... is repeatedly foreshadowed in real time instead of a slap-your-head-moment (and in my playthrough was easily overcome without particularly focusing on it's danger) and the nonstandard travel option is both immediately unlocked and intuitive to use.

If you're a fan of the older Star Control games, this one is fairly similar, but improved in the predictable ways (graphics, audio, UI) and worse in gameplay measures. Slow and tedious -- feels like I'm wasting time. Game mechanics aren't very fun, and the narrative / acting is the best part. The Good: Space empire story is interesting. About as good as previous Star Control (2, 3) games. Alien races are interesting and diverse. Graphics are very good. Voice acting is very good. Lots to do, complex missions, sandbox play, big universe, good tools for managing tasks and finding places on the maps. The Bad: Combat space is limited. You have a shrinking arena. It's crazy confining -- you constantly get "cornered" in freaking outer space. I have never played a space combat game this constrained. Mechanics massively bias short-range weapons and slow, big ships. Combat in general feels clunky. Ship weapons aren't well balanced. Lots of useless ships in the game. Space travel is tedious. Resource collection is tedious. Tech upgrades seem randomly available. I don't feel like I have much control of this. The Ugly: Crash, crash, crash. Pretty much every 15 minutes. If you somehow manage to be stable for an hour or so, memory leaks will jack up your entire computer when you run out of ram. Load times are absolutely ridiculous. Like... leave the room, let out the dogs, get coffee, and come back, and it's still loading. And for reference, I have a gaming laptop with 10th gen 6-core i7, 32gb ram, 500gb ssd, and nVidia RTX 2070 gpu. Powerful enough to tear through any AAA game. No excuse for this game being marginally playable with all this power.

If you're anything like me, you own a large number of video games. Many of them, you haven't played at all. Some, you have played a bit but lost interest. A small number, you have played to completion. My wife and I played this one all the way through, and we just bought the Earth Rising DLC. The main game was satisfying and complete, but we wanted more. For clarity, I play and she watches. We were huge fans of Star Control II. We played it together before we were married. Despite the 5 star review, the game isn't perfect. I just felt it was closer to 100% than 80% (which would be 4 stars). So, understand that the following negative points are nit-picky and didn't significantly hurt our enjoyment. I didn't like the controller mapping, but it is fully configurable, so I was able to set it to something I liked, which included putting steering/rotation on the second analog stick. I didn't care too much for the planet-surface resource gathering at first, but it grew on me. The lander has a turbo speed mode, and make sure you get the ability to jump soon otherwise some planets are a huge pain. I didn't like that the ship battles take place in a constrained arena, or that the arena slowly shrinks. I adapted to it, but I still much prefer the more open approach from SC2. The story is weaker than SC2's, but it was fine. A number of people complain about the game being a grind. We didn't find that at all. In fact, early in the game, we voluntarily "grinded" more than we needed to and ended up with far more money than we could spend for the rest of the game. It was a bit disappointing that there wasn't a separate market for captured lifeforms, like the Melnorme trader in SC2. In the end, there's no real incentive for capturing creatures. When you visit a base and new items are available for sale, it would have been very nice if it would list them instead of making you hunt for them. People also complained about slow movement, but you get faster with upgrades.

Star Control 2 is still one of the greatest games ever made. I personally love Star Control 1 as well despite its more simple strategic premise. Both games ooze a sense of style and flair that is kind of lacking in this game, but that doesn't mean Origins lacks its own perks. For one thing, Star Control Origins certainly *looks* more alive than Star Control 2. The graphics are better, but more importantly the planets feel just that much more alive when you're wandering on them in a lander in 3D. Combat feels a tad more smooth but it's possible that's just because there are powerups to go after during the battle and the starting ships you can get seem pretty effective and intuitive. But when it comes to tactical combat, that might be what gave Star Control 1 and 2 more charm. In the original series the ships you could start with (in 2) and the total fleet in 1 have more clear pros and cons. The Earthling Cruiser is a great ship, but if it was trapped in a gravity well or had a faster opponent that could keep pelting in during a pursuit, the Cruiser would be in trouble. In Origins it feels like there are fewer stakes so far after a few hours in. Fwiffo was broken in Star Control 2, yes, but there was still the possibility of getting overrun quickly in early game if you made a mistake or two. There's a reason why several fans have had a backlash against this game that goes beyond the lawsuit. And it is because this game loses a lot of the original series' charm in its dialogue. Fewer dialogue choices overall and a script that seems outdated already truly hurts this player's experience. And yet, does that mean this game is Bad? No I wouldn't say so. Star Control 2 is still one of the greatest games ever made, following in the wake of Star Control 1 which brought simplified 4X style gameplay before Masters of Orion 1 (and, for more contemporary audiences, long before Stellaris was a thing.) Origins tries to match them, and falls short- but it tried!

Pros: quite funny at times. good quality and diversity on the design of the aliens and the voice actors are really great. Fun to explore the mystery. Cons: The game ends abruptly, so abruptly that i feelt the story was just getting started. Its very repetive, both dialogs and collecting as well as combat. Overall it feels very incomplete, and looking at the seasson pass, I guess that was by design. A shame, it could have been interesting with exploring the changing power ballance between the alien factions, but its basically another version of the space stage in Spoor. Pricing is way off on this. Bought it at a sale, but i still feel like I got ripped off.