I initially found this on Gog when it was still in development. It was clearly incomplete but presented as complete; this was very misleading! However I replayed it again recently and it is definitely complete. It has silly humour, lots of exploration, a LOT of crafting a bit of shooteyness. All in all it's a nice experience. The only real downside is they often put VERY long corridors in certain areas, which leads to you having to run back to your ship for a full minute each way just to dump off your crafting goodies.... or craft something required to proceed. This can get quite tedious on occasion, especially in two certain walking sections. Still worth buying, even if you wait for a sale!
If you love to explore, collect some goodies and shoot a few enemies, this game is great. It's satirical humour is also a very fun fit to the game. It's true that you cannot manually save, however the teleport points are all over the place; just hit one up and tp back to starting ship to be safe and sound. Hitting esc doesn't pause the game.... this was shocking to me when I found out. I had hit Esc and gone afk for a bit. Since I was playing single player, it was reasonable to assume it had paused. I came back to a welcome back from death screen; it was my first. I'm guessing this was required so you can have co-op mode; yes you can play with friends.
Just like the previous games, the general design is pretty good, the music is nice and customization of your ship is interesting. However, unlike both of the previous games, they have set up the controls so that there is NO auto fire key. Anyone who played the previous games will know what I mean. For those who don't understand: There is a toggle key in both SG2 and SG:Warlords that causes the guns to fire automatically at enemies. For those like me who usually miss 90% of the time in this type of game, it is absolutely necessary! While there are auto homing missiles, they do no where near enough damage to compensate for not using guns... in fact the missiles are severely under powered in this game! Starpoint Gemini 2 is probably the pinnacle of their game design. Starpoint Gemini Warlords is good if you want to sit back and watch your fleet fight the enemy fleet. This one is just unplayable.
It's all around great.. visuals, sound, characters, skill system, combat system, exploration. This is my perfect game, alongside such original classics as Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, etc. Combat system is simple and straightforward... and totally fair. What you can do, so can npcs & vice versa. I played a mage and was teleport-dodging around while flinging bolts and making explosions. It is simple, but effective and fun. The exploration of this island is WONDERFUL! Beautiful, vast and no need to run your ass off to travel; it has a baldur's gate like travel between areas system, as well as a campfire teleport location in many spots around the larger maps! The story is a slow burn, high payoff sort of thing with some surprises in store. Of course, if you are a veteran of hundreds of RPG's, you'll probably see a few of them coming. Loot boxes are all over the cities and often around open maps as well. These level with you, so you might get random crafting ingredients and a few coins or you might get a hat, etc that you'll use till the end game. Best of all, these respawn often when you are away for a bit and come back. The crafting system is simple and useful! Even if you never use bombs, there is at least one type which is used in a few quests. As a mage, I ended up going for the throw bombs section of the rogue tree at end game, when I already had all the mage abilities; this gave me a reason to use all those bombs I'd been finding in chests, etc. The characters can be surprisingly deep at times... one you'll think is an absolute shit can turn out to be a not bad guy and vice versa. You will make choices and they will matter. You are encouraged to play the good guy here and it works quite well. The ONLY thing I can think to criticize this game for is that fact that end game creatures get rather large hitpoints pools. Seriously, that's the only thing I can think of that is at all even slightly annoying!
