Starcom: Unknown Space

I have throughly enjoyed Starcom: Nexus but I have have to say that I am enjoying this title far more. This definitely scratches the "Traveler" itch that I have been looking for in modern video games that I have been craving for a while now. More titles like this please! Space sims are my favorite genre after all

I'm getting old, and most games nowadays don't really seem that enjoyable anymore, but this one really made me feel like I was a kid again, discovering new worlds. Together with its prequel, I highly recommend it.

This is my first Starcom game. a Supris and a lot of fun.

The game isn't bad, but just a minor improvement of the predecessor, which suffered from the same problems dragging down the experience. Not worth the full price, maybe get it when it's on a sale for under 10 dollar. First, exploration feels shallow. The "lore" of the planet exploration is interesting to read at first, but feels AI generated. It's text pieces that will give you some random resources as a reward and 99% of the exploration has no connection to the world or to other exploration. After 4 hours, only one time did it have a connection to the world and that was just asking me to "talk to someone". After a while, it becomes repetitive, as I just can't feel connected to the random text I am reading and it feels like all I'm doing is look at AI generated pictures and click the accept button. Next, the combat is bad. Since it happens so often and can't be avoided, it should feel great and fun, which it doesn't. The ship turning is very finicky with keys (making fixed weapons a pain to use), so I chose to turn to mouse cursor - but that is very unresponsive and doesn't precisely recognize the cursor movement, forcing you to often shake the mouse around to get the ship to turn. Not that it would matter anyway, as the best way to do combat is to aggro the enemy and then just fly backwards shooting at them until they are dead.. Then there are just plain bad design decisions, like some keys being hardcoded (why are devs still doing that?). I wanted my fixed weapons to fire on my right mouse key, instead it's hardcoded to targeting (which doesn't do anything), so now I always get a giant marker over the enemy obscuring other enemy ships, making my right-mouse key basically useless. You also get a few immersion breaking visual bugs, like flickering outlines around the planet atmosphere, which should have been fixed before release, but at least no gamebreaking bugs so far. There are a lot other problems, but the GOG review limit doesn't let me write any more..

I'll admit that I really enjoy the rival game, Star Control Origins. But I don't think I was compelled to play that game quite like I was this one. I've spent hours tweaking exactly how my ship is laid out.