Starcom: Unknown Space

Game is good except for some of the planet RNG stuff can become burdensome when you get a bunch of bad outcomes.

Upplevs som ett tidigt 2000-tals spel med 2 D grafik och dialog bilder från ett tidigt Star Trek spel.

Surprisingly entertaining space game. If you like building your own space ships, exploring, resource gathering, and a bit of strategy, you will like this. You only get one ship but it is 100% able to be customized to your strategy or play style. The only downside is some of the more advanced components only appear near the end of the story and limit the amount of time you get to play with those new techs. Otherwise good job!

Basically an expanded version of Starcom Nexus. Better particle effects than I remember. I would swear some of the music and sound effects are the same but the atmosphere is still good. I played that game all the way through several years ago. I have a review of that too. I'm pretty sure I got this in Early Access but it's languished in my backlog until now. This time there are better annotations on systems/quests, but you still better be making notes on the map (right click star map, there is a checkbox on the starmap too to highlight unexplored areas which includes traders - I'd turn that on too). You can set auto-aim in your Ship Systems (default Z) which I recommend at least for asteroid field farming. I'm not a Trekkie, but this is clearly inspired by that, exploration is the focus. So far I haven't noticed any bugs and the last game was well made too. 3/15/26 - I 'finished' the game yesterday. There were still maybe half a dozen side things I could have done. It's a great game, I would recommend especially to Trekkies. I do have some nitpicks. - Resource scarcity. Even sometimes just logging in to farm for materials, and doing some trading, which I did a fair bit, I never had enough materials to build the last two ship classes at all. I finished the game with over 1900 research points remaining, and only two weapon types maxed out. [spoiler] The problem is even a cursory look will show you some of them are not worth pursuing. I focused mostly on speed and range (missiles/plasma) and never built past Cruiser. Drones are underpowered. If you manually aim you get a tighter spread which means you can pick things apart more easily with Plasma and the range becomes enough to out range most things until end game, it doubles as perfectly good at shooting down drones and missiles too which means Havoc guns or whatever serve no purpose, this is fine but why would you use anything else? Lasers have heat problems, Plasma also doesn't have any heat so less to worry about and less spaces on designs too. Plasma is hands down the best all around choice and it's what you start with. Shields require manual activation, which immediately turned me off those too, I only needed forward deflectors and then I'd scuttle backwards picking things apart. Fixed guns might be okay, but they're fixed and short range and didn't seem worth it either. What I'm saying is Plasma is fine, Missiles are fine, everything else could use buffs. The gravity thing you're forced to use would have been a lot cooler if you could use it to do things like throw enemies in to the sun or whatever. Sure you can KIND of do that but not without eating a lot of ♥♥♥♥ which makes it not worth even trying. [/spoiler] Missing QoL things: - UI scaling, this might be the one most needed. Everything is tiny on my 2K gaming monitor and I was forced to zoom in and out constantly to see anything and sometimes items are like 2 pixels. The game does mostly a good job at marking important things which are this small but not always. - Warp gate radius is tiny, so autopilot often overshoots forcing you to out of the star map and back to the regular game to press the warp again before you can use it. Not game breaking but annoying. - Autopilot, while it can map through warp gates which is cool, also always prioritizes those even it's 10x faster to just fly across empty space. It also pumps the breaks far too early when approaching stations and goes well out of its way around 'friendly' ships to the point where you're better off doing it manually. Still overall well worth the time and effort. The game doesn't spoon feed you everything, you do have to solve some puzzles. I'd love to see a substantial DLC expansion or a 3rd game. Keep up the good work! 3/4/26 - TIL you can mouse over the type of mineral in a trading station and it will tell you what modules you have that use it and how much you need to build one. Super useful. 3/3/26 - You can die at 98% hull somehow. I assume this is from the crew module or whatever but there is absolutely no in game feedback about that. I still had 9/10 support staff alive too. This really should either be indicated or removed. It sucks pretty bad to lose like 30 minutes of whittling down an enemy fleet dancing around just to get killed out of nowhere with no warning.

Nice game, interesting story line and that drove things forwards. Ability to select different research paths to increase capabilities with different branches. Recommended.

For an early release game, this game is worth the money. The play area is huge. The amount of universe development is excellent. So many mysteries to uncover and solve. I've gotten lost in the game and forgotten to go to bed a couple of times.

exploração com bom enredo e combate recomendo pra quem gosta do gênero