The best way to describe Star Control: Origins is familiar, but unimpressive. Initially it looks like Star Control 2 with a serious graphical overhaul. The alien dialogue screens are well animated / voiced, the combat felt familiar and responsive, the solar/planetary expeditions looked impressive, and the initial story arc seemed like it could be very interesting. However after playing for about 6 or so hours, I just find that it doesn't have the soul to keep me invested enough to continue playing: - Battles are repetitive, but OK - The dialogue / story at this point isn't that good and felt like like a generic story with similar themes / pacing to the original. - The solar / hyperspace exploration just feels unnecessarily slow, making me waste time without anything interesting to do. - Planetary exploration is beyond tedious and given that resource gathering / planet exploration is key to Star Control 2 like games, I don't know if this issue can be fixed. Every world is basically the same Spore-like planet with a slightly different texture, where you waste time driving / hopping around the same terrain features to pick up uninteresting resource icons and occasionally see one of the few critter models lumbering around. Planetary performance is also quite bad, where simple lightning / fire / fog effects can drop a 1080Ti into the 30fps range only to rebound to the 120 fps afterwards. I thought I might just be remembering SC2 too fondly, so I fired up UQM HD and actually had more fun with that. The exploration of systems/planets was faster and even though it is far simpler looking, I preferred the speed/ease of gathering resources with the top-down view. The combat is still fun and most importantly the story / writing was much more interesting. To be fair I planned to give around 2.5 stars, but unfortunately I can't and it feels more like a 2 star than it does a 3. I guess it is possible to be patched with additional content, but now it feels hollow.
