If you're anything like me, you own a large number of video games. Many of them, you haven't played at all. Some, you have played a bit but lost interest. A small number, you have played to completion. My wife and I played this one all the way through, and we just bought the Earth Rising DLC. The main game was satisfying and complete, but we wanted more. For clarity, I play and she watches. We were huge fans of Star Control II. We played it together before we were married. Despite the 5 star review, the game isn't perfect. I just felt it was closer to 100% than 80% (which would be 4 stars). So, understand that the following negative points are nit-picky and didn't significantly hurt our enjoyment. I didn't like the controller mapping, but it is fully configurable, so I was able to set it to something I liked, which included putting steering/rotation on the second analog stick. I didn't care too much for the planet-surface resource gathering at first, but it grew on me. The lander has a turbo speed mode, and make sure you get the ability to jump soon otherwise some planets are a huge pain. I didn't like that the ship battles take place in a constrained arena, or that the arena slowly shrinks. I adapted to it, but I still much prefer the more open approach from SC2. The story is weaker than SC2's, but it was fine. A number of people complain about the game being a grind. We didn't find that at all. In fact, early in the game, we voluntarily "grinded" more than we needed to and ended up with far more money than we could spend for the rest of the game. It was a bit disappointing that there wasn't a separate market for captured lifeforms, like the Melnorme trader in SC2. In the end, there's no real incentive for capturing creatures. When you visit a base and new items are available for sale, it would have been very nice if it would list them instead of making you hunt for them. People also complained about slow movement, but you get faster with upgrades.
