Starpoint Gemini 2

It's pretty much Mount and Blade in space.

I usually don't write reviews for games on Steam. However I figured this one was worth it to let other space game fans know. If you are a fan of the free roam mode in Freelancer or the X series games you'll probably like this game. It's not as deep as the X series games but more complicated than Freelancer. The story itself is ok. The voice acting is not. Not the worst I've heard in a game though. For years I kept looking for something close to Freelancer and finding little to nothing out there. I kept passing up this game due to some of the negative reviews and the UI looked like something from a kids game. I ran across it on a sale with all it's DLC one day and figured for the price I couldn't go wrong. I bought the game and it sat in my inventory for another 3 months before I installed it and decided to see if it was worth the time. Now I wish I had ignored the negative reviews and gotten this game sooner. After many hours with it I've barely got half the map uncovered and still have a lot of side quests to do along with the main story. Is the game perfect? Not at all but neither was Freelancer or the X games. Travel can get a bit tedious at times but that's what the T-Drives are for. Buy at least one everytime you dock and pretty soon you'll be sitting on a pile of them. They are a little expensive but if you start the game like I did it won't be a problem. When you start out you want to optimize for boarding ships. That means hiring crew with bonuses to Transporter capacity and Troopers. Putting the first 3 perk points into the Trooper category, and upgrading the grappler on your ship. If you do that and then start capturing ships with less crew than yours or dropping the number of crew by shooting the other ships hull below 50%. You will be making a lot of money selling those ships and running missions and you won't have to worry about the long travel times too much because you'll be sitting on stacks of T-drives. I've only ran into a couple bugs so far and they were nothing game breaking or too bothersome. More of an inconvienence. 1. I took a freelance mission and during the mission one of the NPC became invincible some how with most of his health gone. I couldn't capture the ship and I couldn't kill it. I had to cancel the mission and lost out on a few credits but not a big deal. 2. The other bug was when I docked one time and opened my Perk points to spend them. I had two available. I spent the perk points, then undocked and almost immediately ran into a group of ships I shouldn't have tried to tangle with. I died and loaded the auto save point. Wen't back in to spend my perk points again and I only had one available. So that kind of sucked. However after looking at my level and the points I had spent already I should only have had one to spend in the first place. The game looks decent and plays pretty smoothly. The controls are very well done. The UI might not look like much but it's functionality and the way they set up the control scheme is very intuitive and easy to get into. I haven't got into the portion of the game where you control wings of fighters yet, but I look forward to it. If you're looking for a space game fix, do yourself a favor and pick up this game.

[h1]This game is boring![/h1] When I think about Space Sim games, then I think about exploring, trading, fighting, influencing and modding your wonderful spaceships... maybe even build some bases or outposts. First of all, the campaign is garbage. Poor writing paired with terrible voice acting really isn't a nice experience-- and if you want to skip dialogues... you can't! The devs didn't account for it when making their game engine, and apparently it was too late to change it when they realized that this feature was missing. The game has terrible balancing issues, specially during the campaign. You out-level incredibly quickly, while not getting nearly enough credits to compensate for it-- you'll be stranded without enough money to upgrade to face the higher level enemies, which end up appearing everywhere. The only solution is to go full space pirate slav in the beginning and "capture" as many pirate ships as you can to sell them. That strategy works and a lot of people use it to overcome some of the financial stress you'd otherwise experience later on-- basically turning it into an inevitable meta. Do it or suffer. Then you can continue with the campaign, if you still feel like it by then. The impact you have on factions in-game is decided with a good & bad meter. Depending on which missions you accept you'll be moving towards one extreme... so it's extremely binary in that sense. You're either with the companies or with the outlaws. The classes require a lot of skillpoints to properly notice the effect of their skills, requiring a lot of leveling. Remember that I told you that the meta is to first stay on the lower levels and capture pirate ships? You won't be noticing much of your class until you're done grinding for money and started progressing with all missions. The graphics are actually pretty nice, but there isn't that much to interact with in each sector... and even when docking to stations or planets, there isn't much to do there either. All in all, this game isn't worth its money. Space Sims have a lot of implications; a lot of games fail at delivering the experience of a good space sim. I'm not even going to give their (the developer's) newest space sims a try. I just know that these devs don't care about the same things I care about.

tl;dr: (6.5/10) This is a really soft do-not-recommend for me. Honestly, Starpoint Gemini 2 should scratch the space sim itch. It has all the theoretical pieces, but I've tried taking a crack at it twice (the second time I revisited it, I couldn't even remember having played it - that's how little of an impact it had on me, until the bad voice acting jogged my memory) and both times I walked away saying "eh..." If you like games like Freelancer or Rebel Galaxy, there is a solid chance you will like this. For me it was just too mediocre to choose to keep playing over the many other more gripping, engaging games available these days. [b]Positives[/b] - Right out of the gates you can choose to do the story, or just go open world and do as you wish. As far as I could tell from my little bit of gameplay, there wasn't really a time pressure on the story either, so you could something in the middle (which is what I did). That flexibility is nice. - Loads of ways to customize your ship, lots of ships to choose from, and TONS of upgrade options. - Crew boarding is a strategic option, with different numbers of 'marines' available based on ship type. - Three Officer slots also add to the ability to really craft a specialized approach to how you play. In my short time, I saw officers that did just about everything, from boosting sales profits or increasing scan radius, to adding unique modifiers for certain weapons or making your ship more resistant to certain forms of damage. - The galaxy felt big. No shortage of places to fly around. - Missions were varied, with many types of side missions to choose from based on your preferred style of play. - Simple but versatile alignment system. Going pirate is definitely an option. Lots of pirate factions, and plenty of pirate bases, and joining them is a simple matter of pushing your 'alignment' away from lawful, which would be the direction you would go if you wanted to be by-the-book instead. [b]Negatives [/b] - Boring. This is obviously subjective, but I just didn't really enjoy the combat, and all the activities that one does in a space sim (trading, travelling, exploring, missions, side missions, mining) just...lacked something. The pieces were all there, but somehow they just didn't come together in a compelling way. - Slow. As mentioned, the galaxy is big, but for me it was a bit too annoying to get around it. There were jump gates, wormholes and these interesting green slipstream-type canals to help get you around, but the moment that a destination got any distance from these, you were looking at long trips. Maybe in a more patient state of mind I'd have even found that peaceful in the right cases, but you also can't let your guard down because enemies can just pop out of seemingly thin air. - Power Management offers theoretical advantage that turns into practical tedium. While your fast travel mode is "Power to Engines," you also need to manually switch all of your power to your engines part of your power triad (weapons, defenses and engines, iirc) to get the most out of your "Power to Engines" mode. But then anything goes amuck and your in combat, you need to switch that again. I feel for Starpoint because its a great idea that is common in many space sims, but in this case it became annoying very fast for me. - Grating voice acting + unskippable dialogue. 'Your character,' Adrian Faulkner, has one of the most annoying voice actors I've ever heard. Again, subjective, but I had to turn the voice acting off within 5 minutes of the start of the game because it was that irritating to listen to him talk. The other voice actors vary slightly up or down from an average of 'mediocre.' Unfortunately, the dialogue is all timed out based on the voice acting durations, presumably to feel more natural, but if you choose to turn it off like me, you wish for a skip option since you can read the subtitles much faster. - Tedious Grind. I was still early on, but the main ways to make money were all available early - a good thing, in theory. However, trying out all of them - trading, mining, fighting, missions - I found all of them to be irritating in their own ways. Sorting through the trade / market systems was an in-and-out-and-in-and-out of menus chore that quickly grew irritating; mining was pretty straightforward, which can be nice, but managing the loot from it to get the most out of each mining run was, again, tedious with a lot of irritating menu use. Either you do it with quick-loots and get less, meaning more times back and forth from the nodes to the closest station, or you dealt with the menus to get the most out of each shot. Fighting was the funnest, but again that aforementioned power management system was wonky, and even in the early systems you'd find yourself stumbling into "Impossible" rating enemies and having to turn tail quite often. Missions, which did feature refreshing variety, almost always involved a lot of travelling off the beaten path, sometimes involving going through areas of unmarked, elevated danger, meaning more tucking tail and running (sometimes in the wrong direction). [b]Mixed[/b] - The whole thing. If you blend up the Positives and Negatives above, you'll probably see that I swing back and forth a lot. There are a lot of pieces that ought to make a good game, and space sim fans would not be foolish to at least give this game a shot. For me, though, I'll be hiding this in my library for good this time, and continuing to try space sims 'til I find one that grabs me like Freelancer, or even Rebel Galaxy.

I tried hard to like this game, having loved older titles like Freelancer and having recently completed Everspace. I wanted to make money by trading on the side in order to stay ahead of the curve with what appear to be levelled encounters with enemy ships. Unfortunately, trading awards XP based on the profit you make, so despite earning several millions credits in the first 10 hours, this propelled me to level 20 and left me woefully underpowered. Even having identified a ship upgrade, trying to navigate random encounters with enemies to purchase it and become 'viable' again was frustrating and put me off future attempts. In a game with levelled enemies, there needs to be a method for the player to gain an advantage - the logic of the XP system in SG2 is critically flawed in this regard and as such, I would not recommend the product.

Would not recommend unless you are really into flying space cargo ship && this game is on sale. I think I purchased the whole game + 2 dlc for less than $10, that’s how I justify the hours I have spent on it… Pro: 1. Relatively good graphic. 2. Some of the soundtrack are pretty good. 3. You get free Origin DLC which contains the remake of the first game. 4. Quite a few different looking ships. 5. The energy grid is really creative. Con: 1. The campaign is really bugged. I have to re-load and redo several missions quite a few times so continue the story. Example #1, one mission required me to leave one area for another area, I used T-Jump device to teleport to the destination and apparently it doesn’t count, took me 30 mins to figure why the story is not continuing. Example #2, at the end of the story, very last submission, you will need to destroy Brotherhood’s mothership. However, if you spent too much time on the previous submission and NPC have already reduce the mothership’s HP to 0 and you will stuck here forever with an invincible mothership that’s just won’t go booom. This took me at least three re-loads and a 5-mins google search to figure out. I had scream out loud at the time I passed, ‘are you me? Coding program without doing any test?’ And guess what, there is another bug just following that, I have no idea what’s working behind the scene but apparently there was a lot of I/O on my disk and lagged final CG to the level of unwatchable. BTW, I reload twice to get passed this one Example #3, there are some bugs related to the whole HP system, sometime my ship would explode during the battle with tons of HP in hull system 1 sec ago and sometime my ship simply became invincible (remember that mothership…) with a negative HP (integer overflow?) 2. The battle is really boring and can get repetitive real quick. This is the biggest con of this game which eventually led me to remove it from my library after finishing the campaign. Normally I would spend a magnitude of more time on similar space adventure sand box. Yes, there are a long list of available ships and a big combination of pilot ability + ship ability. Still I can’t find much difference operating a gunship or a Titan class monolith. The absence of weapon groups made this even worse. Now you only have two weapon classes, light and heavy (shockwave, missile, and torpedo). It’s hard to create a fighting strategic which starting by disabling enemy’s shield first under this situation. Also, the difference between missile and torpedo is really small. In other games torpedo normally deliver more damage at the cost of homing ability and flying speed. It’s not the case here, otherwise it would be pretty interesting to modify a small stealth-enabled gunship to a deadly killing machine. Carrier is a little overpowered while being underpowered. Its fighter teams can be a big threat to regular enemy but somehow setting target on several stationary entities won’t work. Besides, I totally understand fighters or bombers can be damaged but I can’t find a clue on it happens. Maybe they were hit by shockwave or mines but I have never seem any partial damaged fighter group. It’s either intact or just gone in the empty space after a big boom. Weapons have very limited working angles, which is reasonable for light weapon but I have no idea why developers would make it the same on the missiles. You would have to completely show your side to your enemy to fire a missile installed on your ship sides. Seriously? You can teleport troops to the enemy ship yet you can’t transmit locking data from your main sensor to the side weaponry? Enemy AI is either non-existing in this game or this is just one extremely aggressive world. A most basic gunship would open fire to my ship, the biggest and most powerful vessel in the game, and will fight to its death without a second thought. Well, I can keep going on this list but I guess you should have some ideas by now. Edit, typos

bombarded with tutorial information. i'm supposed to remember what every key does for every aspect of the game within the first 30 seconds of playing. how about just telling me how to fly when i figure out how to fly. tell me how to shoot when the enemy part comes up. i've tried playing this twice now and it's just not a well put together UI. There are a thousand buttons, and again, every 30 seconds there's an excerpt telling you how to use 15 of the 1000 buttons. yes i will easily remember how to do all of these things. honestly, change how the intro tutorial works and you'd have a much higher take rate. i want to play this game but i'm immediately overwhelmed and frankly discouraged from trying to figure everything out through checking the internet / controls / in game help. learning the game and enjoying it needs to be natural, fundamentally.

这是我第一次在STEAM上评论，这游戏很喜欢，但是语言不通，请求汉化，谢谢！！！！！！！ We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!! We need Chinese！！！！！THANKS!!!!!