Starpoint Gemini 2

Final update: Finished game. final thoughts to each section posted at end of them. Summary: Do I recommend it? Yes, but maybe not for $35. I got it on sale pricing for 75% off if I recall. Its got blaring issues keeping it from being a great game worth $35, but still worth checking out at discount. Story: Voice acting is bad. very very bad. I think only two voiceactors in the game did a good job and they had smaller roles. The main voiceactors of the story were awful. the story is also hard to follow which is partially due to the horrible scripting of the characters. At least it has a main objective to follow. [Final Update]: The story ended up being ok overall, theres a ton of plot holes, story elements that just dont make sense, and some of the worst character behaviors and scripting i think I have ever seen. You will see yourself saying "....really!?!?" several times before the end of the story. The final battle and ending was the most cliche, anti-climactic thing ive seen in a while. Combat: Still wonky. when enemies hit 50% health they go bonkers and start excessively bobbing and weaving forcing you to turn on automatic firing mode to hit anything. Its comical to see large ships like battleships do these crazy maneuvers. trivial enemies can still overpower your larger ships, and you can still overpower ships way larger than you which, to me, indicates balance issues. I recently hired Mercs to follow me around, their AI is awful... it takes them forever to engage any enemies near you unless you mark them first. All those Cons said though.... its still fun to fly around space ships and blast things. [Final Update]: In order to not get destroyed in the game you have to upgrade to the bigger ships. Nuff said. Combat gets boring as you just hit Fire At Will mode to let your ship shoot automatically (otherwise you arent taking advantage of the bigger ship's abilities to fire at ships in 4 directions at once). Once you upgrade to the Tzar Carrier the game is basically easy and over. There are a few epic battles where it just feels great to be the captain of this huge carrier in the middle of a large fight, but those battles are far and inbetween... only like 2 or 3 missions total. Sim: Terribly unbalanced reward systems. The money you get for time consuming freelance missions or commodity trading is pennies compared to the money you get from capturing ships and selling them. While its nice because it speeds up the game tremendously.... it ruins the Sim part of the space sim. Income for missions and commodity trading should be boosted tremendously to compete with ship selling so there are more ways to play the game. That said, while there are numerous ships, weapons, and upgrades... only a handful standout among the others and the rest are bad or just have negligible stat differences between other ships in their class. The biggest pro to the sim is the universe of the game. Man the space, destinations, anomalies, ets are all beautifully crafted. [Final Update]: Not much changed with the sim. If you do anything other than sell ships you will be grinding the game for a very long time to afford anything. You do find a station called the Spire late game which sells every License in the game including the one that makes use of the fast travel system free. So theres that... I just wish missions and trading got you more money.