If you're a fan of the older Star Control games, this one is fairly similar, but improved in the predictable ways (graphics, audio, UI) and worse in gameplay measures. Slow and tedious -- feels like I'm wasting time. Game mechanics aren't very fun, and the narrative / acting is the best part. The Good: Space empire story is interesting. About as good as previous Star Control (2, 3) games. Alien races are interesting and diverse. Graphics are very good. Voice acting is very good. Lots to do, complex missions, sandbox play, big universe, good tools for managing tasks and finding places on the maps. The Bad: Combat space is limited. You have a shrinking arena. It's crazy confining -- you constantly get "cornered" in freaking outer space. I have never played a space combat game this constrained. Mechanics massively bias short-range weapons and slow, big ships. Combat in general feels clunky. Ship weapons aren't well balanced. Lots of useless ships in the game. Space travel is tedious. Resource collection is tedious. Tech upgrades seem randomly available. I don't feel like I have much control of this. The Ugly: Crash, crash, crash. Pretty much every 15 minutes. If you somehow manage to be stable for an hour or so, memory leaks will jack up your entire computer when you run out of ram. Load times are absolutely ridiculous. Like... leave the room, let out the dogs, get coffee, and come back, and it's still loading. And for reference, I have a gaming laptop with 10th gen 6-core i7, 32gb ram, 500gb ssd, and nVidia RTX 2070 gpu. Powerful enough to tear through any AAA game. No excuse for this game being marginally playable with all this power.
Seriously, I can't play for more than about 5 minutes before this crashes, and it crashes so badly that I can't get to Task Manager or the desktop and have to reboot my computer over and over again. I've given it about half an hour and like 5 reboots and dropped all the video settings (Geez, 11th gen i7, 16G RAM and RTX 2070; I should be solid at ultra settings) and still crash after crash after crash. Just not worth it.
First off, let's be clear that 5 stars means that out of a random selection of 5 games among what you'd expect of this genre, this game is likely to be the best of them. I don't mean to say that this is a perfect game and there are better. It is a first person action RPG, similar to games like Fallout, Cyberpunk, and Elder Scrolls. Stylistically, I think it most closely resembles Fallout, and I'm inclined to compare with that, because I consider Fallout to be a gold standard for this genre. If you're thinking about buying this game and haven't played Fallout (and thus this review isn't helpful), get Fallout 3 or 4 or Fallout New Vegas, instead. This is really a very similar game, and those are unequivocally better. This game has the same building blocks as Fallout -- a big (semi-)open world, levels, attributes, skills, weapons, crafting, NPCs, quests and side quests, and a rich narrative with many possible endings. The game has a fair variety of weapons -- blunt melee, sharp melee, guns, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, plus some quirky (and powerful) "science weapons". Your skills really affect your style of gameplay. Perks and armor are less interesting. Your companions have pretty complicated personalities, each with a story/quest arc that contributes to an end-game narrative. Some people complain that the game dries up about halfway through, and it feels true. This game has a shorter play-through than some games in this genre, and the majority of the game takes place on the first two or three of maybe 7 total areas. It feels like those additional locations could have gotten a similar treatment to the first few and doubled the play time. However, if you accept the fact that the first two worlds *are* the majority of the game, and the story moves a lot faster when you get past them, I don't think that's a serious problem, even though it feels like the pacing is uneven. You should be close to maxing your character at that point, though.
The best game in the genre is often cited as Masters of Orion 2 -- A game that's now 25 years old and has noticeably aged. Stars in Shadows makes a strong effort to dethrone MOO2 by being everything MOO2 was, but better. I would argue that it succeeds in many ways, but has serious deficits and feels incomplete. The good: * The game is gorgeous. All of the graphics are modern, well crafted, and immersive. * A ton of the game is pretty much a straight-up ripoff of MOO2 (a game well worth ripping off!) * The UI is generally pretty good. Doesn't present dense information well, though. The bad: * The tech tree skews toward conflict. Almost no production improvements. Feels incomplete. * Diplomacy is broken. Aliens constantly beg you for money and resources, and if you don't give it to them (which is sometimes risky) they hold a grudge literally forever. If you give them free stuff nearly half the time they ask, you'll still have net-negative reputation. If you try to steer clear of their disagreements, it's as bad as declaring war on them. Permanent. It's impossible to be in anyone's good graces long term. * Diplomacy so incomplete, it's broken. You can clearly see aliens using diplomacy tools early in the game that you never get. Spying? Ask for Help? Almost nothing to spend influence on. * Buggy. Game crashes a lot. Refitting older ships and stations is nearly guaranteed to crash you. And corrupt your saved games. * Overly difficult. Even on the easy settings, mobs eat your lunch until almost the end game. Unless you set raiders to low, they'll wipe you out every game. * Incomplete. There seem to be parts of the game that are undeveloped. Like the subspace nodes. * Metal sucks as a resource. Forces you to maintain a standing fleet, basically. And refit a lot. Which crashes the game. The rest: * A lot of the micromanagement of MOO2 is remediated. Simplified improvements and automatic upgrades are nice in some ways, shallow in others.
