Starpoint Gemini Warlords

There is one huge flaw about this game: enemies are leveled with you. So you're not going to ever get more powerful in this game when leveling.

Okay, first thing right out of the gate you need to know that if you see someone playing this game using the mouse and keyboard to dogfight and they're complaining about how hard it is, they aren't using the controls correctly. While you *can* control the ships manually, it's really just for mining and salvaging. The correct way to perform combat, however, is to do it is like how it was on Star Trek Legacy where you steer your ship with WSAD, look around with the mouse, and use a context menu to issue commands to your crew. Yes, when in combat, you spend most all of your time and effort positioning your ship so that most of your turrets are facing your target while you try to turn any of your decaying shields away from incoming fire, manage power systems, offensive and defensive captain skills, as well as purchased ship add-ons that give additional abilities. All the time this is going on, your crew will engage the enemy ships. You can manually give the command to fire torpedoes and even send marines over to board the enemy ship. Now, with that out of the way this game is super fun and addicting. While you fly around and trade, bounty hunt, defend stations, or even destroy them, you have a little station and empire of your own that you're operating in a simple Master of Orion type game board. It's not so complicated that you'll be pouring over a manual for days just to play your first game. I figured everything out in a few hours of diving in. You collect resources, build structures, expand your borders, defend them from invaders, perform diplomacy duties, sign trade agreements, and build your own fleet. There's a lot that seems to be inspired from X3: Albion Prelude with the HQ expansion where you can reverse-engineer captured ships and then mass produce them. There's tons of stuff to do and you can play the game however you like. Very addicting. I give it five very happy space goats.

So it's Starpoint Gemini 2 with buildable fleets you can move around. The writing is juvenile, and the gameplay's simple, but it's fun, and there's a lot of it. For some contrast, I got this and Endless Space 2 at the same time, and I've spent my time playing this (Endless Space 2 being a broken, buggy, Steam Only mess helped). For a change, would recommend playing this title on Normal instead of max difficulty - everything's the same, but you waste a lot less time grinding and cloak sniping.

Awesome game better than the second one, more diverse more open world. They also managed to bring Titans back yet another plus. What sucks is perhaps the lack of modding tools for GOG version, you need the Steam version to enjoy that which is kind of a bummer. Things that suck? - Bad ai it follows you around in swarming circular patterns and even bumps into you randomly. - Some mission objectives are overly complicated or when you reach them your surrounded by flanks. - Random non important missions feel like a chore sometime. - Constant action might bog some systems down. - Too many things going at times, you scrub one end of the map only to realize a different location has taken over. Unless you have a massive fleet you might be at a disadvantage of reach two or three targets at once. - Terrible camera positions, I like the choice of having 3rd and 1st person views but ship configurations can make both seem odd at times. Liking riding nose end bullet train or a view covered with a ship so large it blocks out the sun. - Your advantage as a captain actually make you seem invincible at first, having four specializations to pick from. What sucks is that it is not across the aboard, you have an enemy that just wants to shoot with no other purpose than that. You feel like at times your a special case having specializations the galaxy lacks. - Run n gun vs Texas style hold outs, I prefer run n gun but there are some missions that require you to take out larger targets. The defenses can be anywhere from minor to over the top impossible. - Its great to be able to apply decals, but not really it seems kind of pointless to me unless they added the ability to actually customize the ships and your fleet.