edit 2: oh and I should say I'm speaking from my experience with SG2. I haven't played Warlords.
I like space trading games.
found this one to suck. some people do like it though.
now, keep in mind, I also didn't like X3. but whereas X3 is just a wall of fucking poorly handled complexity, Starpoint Gemini is just boredom. it doesn't have X3's depth but I don't think it really has much else that X3 doesn't. I think, like X3, it's mainly about its mid-to-late to late game, but it's not as meaningful getting there.
nothing in this game is engaging. combat isn't all that exciting and the game doesn't look all that good. no location or centre of events in it matters; it suffers from soup space as much as the worst games that offend in this regard.
I use the term soup space. I dreamed this up one day to describe what I see as a problem in the way space games handle space. I see mainly two differing ways of laying out space and places in it in these games. in Roberts' games, you have places which are places to themselves and they're usually separated by jump gates or stars, or a mix both. space itself might look different between these two points, it might act different, and importantly the stuff and people in it might be different. you get that clear separation. this also makes interesting narrative or lore easier. I think that's beneficial. there are places you can go and these places are their own places with their own contexts.
oh you're in Alpha Prime? sure, it's a densely populated, over-exploited, mega-polluted, police-state filled with the ruling rich, the stoically home-grown sticking it out here, and everybody else. it doesn't have an open pirate or criminal element but it probably does have a heavy population of the more easy-going grey-area groups.
oh you're in Theta 13? well that's a system of dangerous space orbiting a broken star and people mine for valuable minerals there and oh, by the way, they say Goldboy runners use the system as layover so watch your ass. make sure to fly through the diamond dust clouds at least once. just don't run into one of them freaky moving asteroids they call Venus Flytraps.
that's a better way of doing it imo. in this game, it's worse than X3. space is one giant thing with edit: NO loading screens. jumpgates are like the highways in X Rebirth. nothing ever looks different. it's like X in that it's just the space stations over and over, with the same peppering of asteroids over and over, and no planetary backdrops to look cool. I can't tell if you're in one Solar system or if you're supposed to be moving around between two or what is going on. it just looks like space to look like space.
anyway this is going long.
I don't like the way it looks. the narrative didn't grab me. the culture and/or politics of the people didn't grab me. combat is boring. progression is very grindy and hard. the difficulty spikes with no real separation (no Theta 13 to avoid). space is all the same. much of the stuff in the game is locked away behind late-game progression that it takes forever to get to.
anyway. watch some videos. I didn't like it. it's kind of like X3 but without that game's depth. apparently it's all about the late-game capital ships you an fly.
Post edited April 06, 2018 by johnnygoging
