Star Control III

I know this may be an unpopular opinion, but I kinda like this game. I bought it new in the box over 20 years ago. I played through it a few times and I’ve played through it on gog too. It’s not a spectacular game, but I did enjoy the new races and some of the plot. Other than ship to ship the mechanics of the game are completely different than SC2. If you want this to be like SC2 you will be disappointed. The resources aspect to this game is not good. Nor is the ship building. Also, the 3d map is kinda clunky and it is not easy to use or get used to. I wish they had gone with a map more like SC2. If you want to try this game it can work if you go in not having expectations of it being like the other titles in the franchise.

I ended up playing this game when it was released, having approached it having been a great fan of first the Starflight games, and then their obvious descendent, Star Control II. And then the development got handed off to Legend Entertainment, a studio that had frequently made specious design decisions. And they made specious design decisions. Some of it's just atmosphere-killing stuff. Where in SC2 you would fly your ship around, get pursued in random encounters, and visit star systems - think open world game in space, with resources and treasures to find, a feeling of exploration.... one of the designers said, 'that stuff takes time! Let's just have people warp jump from encounter to encounter'. I shake my head. Someone at the top of the development team just didn't understand the audience, the genre, the feelings that people look for when going after games of this sort. Now ---> if you happen to like the idea of a point and click adventure game with a separate, fun combat engine instead of a space based RPG style game with a separate, fun combat engine.... maybe this is your thing. It's not mine.

The story and writing was what made Star Con 2 remarkable. Here, they focused on fancy alien puppets that the technology of the time couldn't handle, and phoned in the plot, leaving most of the trailing plot ends of Star Con 2 dangling in favour of an already tired "OMG evil robots want to annihilate everybody". To be fair, they didn't completely destroy the game, they just failed to add anything new, and lost a lot of the original creative spark. Combat is fine, although the snazzy new camera angles are unusable. Exploration is fine. Colony development is ho-hum. Diplomacy is okay, with occasional good lines ("Glorified accountlings"), but the puppets actually look worse than the original cartoons (they were supposed to be animated, but they realized half-way through development that the computers of the era couldn't handle it - a general theme of this production), and most of the writing is dull. Still an acceptable game, but given what they had to work with, an inexcusable waste of opportunity.

I don't think anyone will argue that Star Control 2 was the most successful of the Star Control series but don't write this one off as a second-rate sequel either. The space exploration is fun, (albeit frustrating when you're sitting around waiting for more fuel) and the story is genuinely engaging and rivals anything the big studio game-mills churn out today. All the old races are there, and are brought to life like never before thanks to the puppeteer genius of Jim Henson's Creature Workshop, who created the race leaders you will interact with. The gameplay has been simplified a bit over SC2 but not, I would argue, to it's detriment. The focus in this title is definitely on interaction with the races and uncovering the story. This game will provide a fun, engaging experience for those who are willing to put aside Star Control 2 and enjoy it for what it is.

I love Star Control 2 to bits, so picking up Star Control 3 is easy. SC3 has a lot of cool bits. The 3D starmap looks amazing, the space exploration is fun, the new races are quirky, the pseudo-3D combat is great! However, one thing that was quite disappointing in my opinion is how easy it is. Once you convince one of the new races to join you, I believe it has one of the best ships and powers in the game and like me, you'll probably just use that for the rest of the game. The built-in hint system also makes the game super-easy, taking away the reward for patient exploration of the galaxy. Also, a few plot twists that has been played in SC2 gets repeated in SC3. I won't spoil it for you, but had you played SC2, you will find yourself saying "Not this again!". It shows lazy story-telling on the devs part. SC3 is a good sci-fi adventure game nonetheless, but in my eyes, it had the potential to be as great as SC2.