I've loved Star Control ever since playing the first one on Sega Genesis in the early 90s. And Star Control II is an indisputable classic. Star Control III is... not quite. I appreciate what they were going for, though. SC3 has a lot of good qualities, but also major flaws. Still, with the help of a walkthrough, I really enjoyed it. Everything you expect from Star Control's mix of strategy, story, and combat is all here. One of the biggest flaws for me was the clock. Sometimes the solution to a problem is to just do nothing. There was a lot of speeding up the clock to trigger an event, and slowing it back down to avoid the approaching doom. (I say that, but I have no idea how long "too long" is to wait... Star Control II's threat was real, though, so I played it safe with this game.) The other major issue I had was the visuals. They don't pop the way they did in previous games--the Daktak weapons look like asteroids; ships are smaller, harder to see, and less colorful, making it sometimes hard to tell them apart. The iso view makes it harder to aim. I also found the play field quite a bit smaller than the previous two games--the planet feels like it's everywhere, and ships with weak engines can get snared by the gravity well and slowly bonk themselves to death. The colony system was also confusing. You don't directly control the factory, and it's hard to tell what it's doing, but fortunately colonies aren't actually that important. In my plathrough, I actually missed a fairly major (but unnecessary) game event because I never made enough colonies to trigger it. The puppets and voice acting are fun, the story is enjoyable, and I had some real laughs. Space combat is still fun and satisfying for the most part. While I can't imagine trying to complete the game in the mid-90s, today, with a good walkthrough, I found it to be a campy, memorable, and enjoyable follow up to one of my favorite franchises and I'm glad I finally got around to playing it.
