You've finally made it out of the academy and have been given your first ship to command. Sure it's just a light shuttle, but you've got to start somewhere, right? Suddenly "somewhere" is stranded in an unknown galaxy surrounded by hostile aliens and no way home.
Explore the beautiful and myster...
You've finally made it out of the academy and have been given your first ship to command. Sure it's just a light shuttle, but you've got to start somewhere, right? Suddenly "somewhere" is stranded in an unknown galaxy surrounded by hostile aliens and no way home.
Explore the beautiful and mysterious open-world of Starcom: Nexus. It's a universe where you'll battle or befriend strange alien races, discover ancient artifacts, research powerful technologies and build your ultimate starship.
Features:
Fully open-world universe with numerous quests and storylines
Hundreds of unique planet anomalies, space discoveries, artifacts and more!
Fast-paced, exciting combat with numerous hostile factions
Over 150 technologies to research
Design your own ship using a modular construction system
Talk and trade with multiple alien factions, each with their own agendas and dynamic AI
If you're reading this and don't know what Star Control 2 is, stop reading now and buy it here or get one of its source ports (e.g. Ur-Quan Masters).
So what's so good about Starcom Nexus? Well, it's a top down 2D space exploration game with some rpg mechanics, great music and epic story.
The writing of the events and dialogues is pretty good and funny at times all this combined results in a chill gameplay experience which you can't put down until finished.
I didn't have any issues playing so either I'm lucky or they've patched them out by now.
In any case I don't think you're getting a shelf filler when buying this game and I can only hope GOG gets Starcom: Unknown Space as well.
Starcom Nexus is mostly an exploration game. You travel through a quiet part of an unknown galaxy. The calmness of space penetrates all aspects of the game. There are no timed events and gameplay can border monotonous. You explore star systems by jumping via star lanes and explore each planet or object by flying over and scan. About half the planets have some kind of anomaly that you can investigate by sending a probe/awayteam. The anomaly is described by a paragraph of text, and can yield resources, research, loss of crew, or nothing. Lost crew can is replenished at the previously mentioned space station. Besides star lanes there are nexus points than allow instant travel to any other explored nexus. Resources and research is spent on building your space ship. It grows in number and variety of components. An improved space ship can travel faster and equip more weapons. You can customize your ship to your playstyle. You unlock multiple weapon systems, and all are viable. Besides opening up new modules, research adds bonuses in terms of +x% damage, +y% range and –z% energy consumption. The game would benefit a lot from more interesting scientific progression. In other words, focus more on unlocking gameplay options such as heavy laser or point defense laser as in Master of Orion. I didn’t like the jump drive. The visuals are nice, but it also ruins the relaxed pace of slowly traveling through the galaxy. In star systems you encounter aliens. Some species are friendly and offer trade or quests. Others are outright hostile. It is not difficult to stay alive in combat, but it provides some excitement and a reason to build a better ship. You can also test your cannons on asteroids and find fossils inside. The story fits well in the game. It is interesting, slow placed and can fit on one side of an A4 paper. Starcom Nexus offers enough side stories and obscure things to entertain for a couple of weeks after a long day of work.
I don't know how many hours I've invested exploring "just one more star". The game is super easy to learn and masterfully designed - You can go literally anywhere you go in the galaxy and discover the (interesting!) story at your own pace and on your own terms. Decisions are interesting, sometimes challenging, but never feel like you missed something super important by choosing the "wrong" option. I'm absolutely loving playing this.
Like the title says.. this is one of them. An absolute favourite of mine. I'm so happy it is finally on Gog. I don't know how many time I've replayed this. It's certainly a game of it's age.. so comparing it to modern games would do it a massive disservice. But I loved it, and many more still do to this day. It is sad we will never get to see a sequel made by the original team. But it is what it is, a true gem from the past.
This little gem which I found by accident during the winter sale really surprised me and brought me back to 30+ years ago where I love playing classics like the Starflight games, Star Control 2 and, many of you might not know this one, the Star Saga Trilogy (which sadly stopped at part 2).
These games all have the same basic concept, you get dropped into a galaxy or star cluster by some reason and have to explore, mine, make contact and fight for survival.
Fighting in Starcom I liked, on normal difficulty it was fun and just enough of a challenge to be nicely relaxing. It's basically a twin stick shooter, move with wasd and aim with mouse.
You get a Master of Orion like research tree, not too complex but with some nice upgrades, get to customize and design your ship, again, it's just complex enough to be interesting and relaxing.
Exploration you do by flying around and scanning planets, duh. Many planets have little things to find, resources and the like, some have bigger stories where you decide on how to proceed that might have larger implications.
You also meet a handful different alien races in their space ships and get to talk to them for information, trade and the like.
The overarching "main" story I liked, not too complex, but interesting to follow and bring to an end.
Honestly, if you are a scifi fan who is willing to read a lot (no voice overs here) like in the olden days, this is really a no brainer of a recommendation.
I liked this so much, I instantly bought the next game in the series which came out last year. Gonna start that one right when I get off work this coming friday and I am, even surprising to myself, really looking forward to that.
