Starcom: Unknown Space

It's annoying but a fun time-sink nonetheless. Yes, I played 34 hours at the time of the review. Yes, I liked it for the first 20 hours or so. It's a lovely time sink. I paid the local currency equivalent of US$13,00 for the bundle of this game and the previous one and I think that's a fair price for the entertainment it gave me for 20 hours. However, beyond that time running the game feels like heading out to a date with someone you know you need to ditch. Purchase at your own risk. Do you remember Journey, the game that was some student's thesis on game storytelling? Starcom Unknown Space seems to be a study on every time gate you can place in a game while toying with a player's expectation for progress or reward: travel time accumulates despite fast travel, there's random drops for tech progress, and random number generation for mission success. There's missions that can be reattempted or reset only after heading back to the home base half a galaxy away, the research screen is gated behind one specific location (the home base, although it's just comms), vague or inexistent hints to progress quest lines, ideas hidden behind crew member pop-up dialogueswhich you may miss if you stood up to get some coffee while traveling from one side of the map to the other. There's an autopilot function that can help with the travel, but be aware that if there's neutral or friendly ships near jump points the autopilot might not be able to resolve this. The game flows as follows: Travel to a system, manually move to a planet, press X to analyze it at which point the game tells you if the planet has something to do for you. Then you press X again to do such thing. Sometimes it's just resources and others it's some item that moves the story forward. The player may even be faced with dice rolls to see if the mission was a success or a failure based on a dice plus whether you picked the right crew member to drop all the relevant skill points on. Then, travel back to the home base just to reset missions and talk to NPCs. Of course, you can respec your crew for the RNG missions, but this is not done at the base but at a planet you randomly find. Oh, and make sure to manually manoeuvre into the path of some comet to get the required item to make it work. At the end of the 34 hours I feel like there's all of three interesting puzzles not based on RNG in the entire map. The good: it's nice to see a game that can be enjoyed that does not require a $2,000 rig. Battles can be a nice challenge and be visually entertaining.

Installed, started playing, ...POOF! ... 3 hours gone.

Highly recommend if you like a space exploration, research tree, spaceship crew says snarky things kind of game.

Like many others recently, I bought the game on a recommendation from The Mighty Jingles. I finished it because the game was easy to get immersed in and fun to play. The exploration aspect of the game is its strongest feature, and carries you through most of the run. Even when you are doing endgame objectives, you will be exploring new space and trying to gather clues. The keyword-searchable log system really helps in terms of trying to figure things out. I like the combat system also. I died a couple times doing dumb, reckless things, which feels fair. If you play smart and to your strengths, you can mostly avoid this. The game also allows you some choice of play style--you can make peace with many alien factions you meet, or you can keep them as enemies. I will definitely be playing another run soon to check out higher difficulties, some different endgame decisions, and experiment with a couple weapon systems that I didn't have the research points to fully get into. The previous game, Starcom: Nexus, is on sale right now through Steam and was an instant purchase for me. I bought Unknown Space at full price and definitely feel like I got my money's worth. I sincerely hope the developer makes more Starcom in the future.

I love it. Its not to difficult to get into, but the more you progress, the more you need to remember. Great story, good vibe. Very Star Trekkie, but in its own right. Yeah, really a very good game.

I played the heck out of this game. I tried a bunch of different ship weapons, generally had fun with the combat, and really enjoyed the exploration. Some minor issues such as some quests/missions being very confusing or even bugged, but those were the exception not the rule. You don't really get all the research points you need to try literally everything, but honestly by the time you get to endgame you probably know what configuration you want your ship to be in anyway. The ship builder was a lot of fun once I got the hang of it. I just really can't complain about this game much. I mean, I guess travel times can be a bit long (until certain things happen). Honestly it was just nice to have a game I could sink my teeth into that had a beginning, middle, and end. And a decent proper science fiction story as well that is wrapped up well with multiple endings. I actually think this game is worth full-price.

Amazing indie game. Must-play for any space exploration fans.

The game is great. I like stylistic and design choices, graphics and sounds are nice and organically filling the story. The main storyline is not trivial and interesting to find out. There are no too boring parts — it's always something new and changing: new races, new worlds, new quests, new ship parts. So the feel of progression is here for the whole game. And one of the main parts of the game is building a ship. I was always a fan of such editors, when you have cell-based structure and different parts and then you're free to do whatever your heart desires. It allows to get something different every time you're getting back to the shipyard. Resource balance is quite good and you're always searching for something to expand your construction capabilities. So, in general, ++ game. About little downsides: one of the main downsides is that there are (for some reason) limits. The limit for a crew level is 4. Why? Why not add possibility to get lvl 5 (which seems possible)? It loses the feel of progression investing anomalies after reaching XP limit. And 6 more points would not make the game unbalanced. Then the limit for max hull. The whole game you're seeing giant battlecruisers of other races — Nimione, Brodigars, Wiskamug, etc. — and you're expecting: one day I'll build it. But no. You will be hard-limited to 155 tiles and that's it, and still there will be much bigger ships than yours. But why? Just give a very expensive option to get a battlecruiser core near the endgame with unlimited hexes — and give people freedom to create! Instead, you have to edit save and game files manually to allow that... The second main con is that AI is stupid. I have started the game on “Normal” difficulty, but almost immediately went to 1.6, then to 2x, then to 3x, and the game still feels too easy… It's just AI movement feels like bugged. They are “stuck” on the verge of plasma/fixed guns range and then rotating there in one place. That way you can easily destroy their weapons and then kill them without any issue. And also, their weapons target drones and missiles first. So as long as you have at least 1–2 missile launchers or 1 drone station — you're invincible. On 3x difficulty I had almost no challenge after 1/3 of the game. Even the final battles (with the spiral station and battlecruisers) were easy for the same reasons. If AI would have a little bit more engines and would actually charge to get in range and unload all weapons — it would be much more interesting. So, don't get me wrong, the game is really good. It's just that if AI would be a little bit better, and after ending the game it added some random-generated unlimited universes with random-generated AI ships (or randomly downloaded from Workshop :) ) with increasing damage/hexes every time and gave unlimited hull — I would easily spend 140h here instead of 40h. Would be great, but it is what it is. Still, excellent journey.