Starcom: Unknown Space

Action. Exploration and Story plus space. I love it.

This is a pretty casual game with fairly simple mechanics. If you enjoy a casual exploration game with a bit of point and click combat on the side, this is the thing for you. I certianly enjoy it. I took a star off because the game is fairly simple and repetitive. While there is advancement and ways to get "better" over time, you mostly do the same relatively short game loop over and over which can get a bit tiring.

It's an amazing experience. The gameplay loop of combat and exploration never becomes stale, the way you design your own ship offers a lot of freedom while being mechanically interesting, and the map just seems to grow when you thought you've seen everything. The story offers some really thought-provoking sci-fi concepts but it's not dry. The characters have some real life to them and the alien races are uniquely designed. 10/10 or 5/5, definitely worth the full price, a steal on any kind of sale.

This game is an exploration game mainly, with combat as a feature but not the main focus. If you go into it with the mindset that you're trying to discover stuff and may have to fight, it is a lot of fun. It has a core loop of going out, exploring stuff, doing quests with the other characters (usually aliens), gathering materials (or enemy drops), then going back to upgrade your ship. The ship designer is also really good, needing you to balance out armour and cooling, as higher tier components will overheat on you if you pack them closely together. This loop is solid, and is engaging. It is slower paced, so you can expect multiple minutes of downtime between quests (usually less than 5 unless you made your ship really slow). If you are not great at combat, you can change the difficulty at any time in the options menu. I could see it being tough to kite enemies if you aren't used to this kind of arcade space sim combat. I didn't run into any technical issues on a whole playthrough of the story. Note however the ship does not feel good to me to play with controller, so I dropped to keyboard and mouse. I would recommend you check the box that keeps the game running in the background while you are viewing your quest log, since a lot of my playthrough was pointing my ship in a direction of a quest and reading what I should try to do while the ship was travelling. Nice game for slower explorers all in all.

I really enjoyed the early and mid-game, but the end-game grew a bit tedious. That's when it became apparent that the map is actually pretty static and not procedurally generated as it seemed at first, and the game stopped rewarding me for exploring and pretty much forced me to get on with the story. Until that point it was very fun, though, and even with that it's still an enjoyable game that I'm glad to have played and can only recommend. Took me pretty much exactly 30 hours to beat.