Star Control: Origins

[Geezer]

So has anyone played yet?

Anyone?

There are currently 365 reviews on Steam and it has a Mostly Positive rating.  You could read some of them, both good and bad, and get a feel for the game.  There are also probably reviews up on Youtube by now.

[Jarhead0331]

So has anyone played yet?

Anyone?

There are currently 365 reviews on Steam and it has a Mostly Positive rating.  You could read some of them, both good and bad, and get a feel for the game.  There are also probably reviews up on Youtube by now.

A lot of people come here for trusted opinions. I like to think we give more reliable impressions than steam reviews on average. I'm sure Flick is aware there are external sources of review.

[Steelgrave]

^Ditto. A good (or bad) word from the folks on here I trust is worth a hundred Steam reviews to me.

[FlickJax]

So has anyone played yet?

Anyone?

There are currently 365 reviews on Steam and it has a Mostly Positive rating.  You could read some of them, both good and bad, and get a feel for the game.  There are also probably reviews up on Youtube by now.

A lot of people come here for trusted opinions. I like to think we give more reliable impressions than steam reviews on average. I'm sure Flick is aware there are external sources of review.

Thanks Jar, I come on here because I trust these guys :)

[DoctorQuest]

^Ditto. A good (or bad) word from the folks on here I trust is worth a hundred Steam reviews to me.

+1  O0

[Philippe]

Steam reviews are a difficult commodity, and not really all that reliable.

A review is trustworthy or not depending on what state the reviewer was in when writing it, and whether their taste is similar to your own.

Steam reviews have to be taken with one or more grains of salt, and since you don't usually know anything about the person writing it, the relevance of that review is often anybody's guess.

[Ian C]

I bought it.

I'm not saying this is an issue for everyone but you should be aware that space combat / flight/ maneuvering is very old school arcade style.
Your ship gains acceleration and momentum from its rocket drive. To decelerate, you have to turn the ship's rear to the front and fire engines to slow down. Maneuvering is slow and you can hit planets and bounce off them. Not what I wanted or expected. Your ship's icon is bigger than the planet. If you like old-school space games and the arcade style, you might find this aspect fun. I didn't.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, just...I was expecting something more realistic and I got cartoony sprites and cute celestial obstacles.

Its an expectation mismatch.

Also, before purchase on the STEAM page I saw it has a planet and universe creator / editor feature. I'd read a few STEAM reviews and was on the fence, but as a modder and creative content creator this was the feature that sold it for me.

After install it was the first thing I checked out. but these two features are not in the game yet, even though these features are listed.


I didn't have the game installed long enough to form any kind of opinion other than I hated the space combat and I felt cheated about the editing features. I got a refund after 11 minutes of play.

I might look at it again in future, but after the features are fully enabled and I can get over the arcade 80's combat.


Here's a STEAM review which appears well-constructed and objective.  Most of this review's gripes can be fixed by the devs in future updates. I guess if they address them, they will have something that will please everyone.


ShaneRR
36.2 hrs on record
POSTED: 23 SEPTEMBER
tl;dr; A beautiful and very funny adventure which is drowning in grindy, under- or mis-developed mechanics. [Verdict: 2/5]
=========================================
I have bought the game myself and completed it.
Let's list all the positives first:
- Very good art direction overall. Graphics, animations, aliens: all are very well done and a joy to look at.
- Good story. Nothing super-original, but good enough with some minor twists and turns.
- Interesting lore: using the main and also side quests there is a lot background information which enriches the world of this game.
- Very funny!: Yes, the humor is a bit juvenile at times, but I really liked it. The single-mindedness of the alien races is very well done and is grounded within the story. Which means it's not only for show but has a reason to be there and puts a dark twist on the humor.
- Technically polished. I had no crashes, hardly any bugs (mainly some graphical glitches during interactions with aliens) and the performance is good enough. Though the loading times should be much shorter.

=========================================
Unfortunately there is also some very bad stuff, which lowers the overall game experience greatly.
- Ship controls:
A large portion of in-game time you will spend flying through the galaxy. Your ship is a piece of junk however (something most aliens point out to you, repeatedly) and handles like an Oil Tanker. Yes, I'm not kidding.
There are upgrade parts which should improve this, but they didn't work for me (bug??) and it will take several hours before you find your first upgrade (unless you are really lucky).
In Star Control 2 (released in 1992!) you could buy those upgrades immediately at your home base if you had the resources. Why does a game from 1992 have a better design for this than a game from 2018?
The ship handling is something you feel ALL the time and in the beginning it's♥♥♥♥♥♥ And it stays♥♥♥♥♥♥for a long time and is really, really frustrating.

- Ship upgrades:
From time to time you get the message that there are new items available to buy for your ship. The equipment menu however is a disaster. There are several slot types. Some of them are multi-purpose, other can contain only a specific item type (like a sensor array or sublight drive).
Those slots are presented in a drop-down menu with a list. In this list is your currently equipped item, all items equipped on the ship of the same slot type, then all items for that slot in your inventory and then all items available to buy. By the and I had up to maybe 20 entries in some slots. And you can only fit about 3 or so before you have to scroll. Do you see the problem here?
Not only is each list highly confusing, but you have to manually check each slot type if there might be something new for you. This is a major design flaw and should have been reworked before release!

- Another design flaw: the Quest/Map system.
In this game you have a map where you can set your own markers. This is good. However, you HAVE to set your own markers because the game doesn't do this for you even for main quests. This is bad.
You have a quest log and a "captain's log". The first is a nice reminder what you have to do. But most of the time it does not tell you exactly where you have to go. It says "Deliver ITEM_X to the RACE_Y homeworld". Ok... where is the homeworld of that race? For that you have to look in the Captain's log. Which is a chronological log of everything important that happened to you. So you start scrolling around and looking for a hint about the aforementioned homeworld.
Now here you will often find links to your destination which engages the autopilot.
A good thing? Nope, pretty stupid thing.
Unless you have memorized the whole galaxy, you don't know where your destination is. Flying around costs fuel. Which means that you will almost NEVER use this feature because you have to check where it is first and plan your journey accordingly. What you do then is try to remember the star's name, go to the map and manually (!!!) type it in to set a marker. This is madness!
In most games such links take you to the map and highlight the respective destination. It is inexcusable that it was implemented in this way.

- Resource gathering
A huge part of the game is earning money. Which means: go to a planet, scan it, land on it and mine resurces (repeat last two several times since your cargo capacity is low in the beginning) and then go to a star base and sell it. Rinse and repeat. A LOT!
That alone is not the biggest issue, but sometimes you will need specific, rare resources for side quests. And guess what, you will have no idea where to get them from! The game does not remember what you found on each planet (something that could easily be done). It's a pain in the♥♥♥♥♥to track down some of the rare resources.

- Resource gathering (2nd):
When you have landed on a planet you can drive around, Mako-style (see Mass Effect 1). Yes, the worst part of Mass Effect is a major part of Star Control Origins. And it still sucks. The controls and graphics are overly simplistic, but still pretty. Your lander however puts even the Mako to shame, flipping and turning on the terrain. Some planets are fine, fun even to hover around. But others are a chore. And the combat mechanics seem rushed and half-baked.
There is also a problem, or possible bug, with the planet screen. Before you land, it shows you if the planet is toxic or too hot. Before you get upgrades for your lander craft, some planetes will kill you in seconds.
For this there are bars which display how hot/toxic the planet is (in red). Your protection level is also displayed (the bars turn light grey).
Now for me, the last bar was always red. I skipped many good planetes, thinking that I didn't have enough protection. At some point I hovered the mouse pointer over it and it said: "protection 15, heat 10". o_O
Yeah... I had more than enough protection all along, but the display is broken. :(

- Space combat automation:
So there is a module you can buy early on which automates the space battles. Sometimes it does a good job, sometimes it's really awful. And you can't turn it off!
I would expect that you should be able to turn off the autopilot at any time during the battle if you get the feeling that the AI is doing badly. But you can't! You have to go to a star base and unequip the module which then leaves you without autopilot.
So if you want to delegate the easier battles to the AI but pilot yourself on harder ones... that is simply not possible.
Again, huge design flaw!

- Weaponry:
Put bluntly: the game does not tell you what damage a weapon does. There is absolutely no way to see if a new type of missile is better that your old one as there is no numerical value given. Just a vague description.
Since combat is a big and important part of the game this is again: huge design flaw.

- Recognizing your neighbours:
Some aliens have pretty unique ship designs and you will recognize them easily. Others you won't, especially since every race has several different designs. There are mouse-overs for them, but you have to be so close for this to function that a potential foe would see you and attack. Something you might want to avoid. The same is true for the planetes in the star systems. Why ???

- Inconsistent dialogues:
Ok, this is a bit nitpicky... So a race is hostile to you, intercepts your ship and then asks you what you want from them. ???
Or: A race has turned neutral after being hostile, but still tries to intercept you and asks you why you hailed them. But you didn't... After a while this gets frustrating because you then have to go through the dialog system to disengange again.
And yes, you can disengange or attack without the dialog. But then you could miss a side quests or something new from that race. It happens sometimes.

- Another minor thing: due to a color perception problem for some of the races I cannot see which part of the galaxy belongs to which race

[JasonPratt]

To be fair, I wasn't expecting anything different from that report about the combat style (or planet harvest style), since that was very typical from the original game (or I should say Star Control 2, since SC1 just had the combat really.) So some other things would bug me, but that wouldn't. On the other hand, I can get that already from the modern fan-update mod "The Ur-Quan Masters", already installed on my home computer -- which is one reason I haven't picked up this game yet. (The other reason is initial bug hunts, which I'll wait to get solved.)

I am provisionally assuming that the clunky-ass starting ship represents the fact that this game is more-or-less remaking Star Control 1 with the gameplay of SC2, and therefore there are in-game reasons why your ship is trash. That was sort of true in the original SC2, too, which is why it was important to pick up allies as soon as possible, since your mothership would be naff at combat for a long time (although it sounds like this may be worse -- which again sort of makes sense to the story, since in SC2 your marooned settlers rediscovered the more advanced ship plans for getting off their planet at the start of the game, so while the ship was very bare bones it would be potentially more advanced already than Earth ships in this story.)

[JudgeDredd]

So has anyone played yet?

Anyone?

There are currently 365 reviews on Steam and it has a Mostly Positive rating.  You could read some of them, both good and bad, and get a feel for the game.  There are also probably reviews up on Youtube by now.

A lot of people come here for trusted opinions. I like to think we give more reliable impressions than steam reviews on average. I'm sure Flick is aware there are external sources of review.

Thanks Jar, I come on here because I trust these guys :)

Mug!  :P

[Geezer]

Wow, look at that, a well written cogent STEAM review.  Who knew there could be such a thing!   ::)

[FlickJax]

So has anyone played yet?

Anyone?

There are currently 365 reviews on Steam and it has a Mostly Positive rating.  You could read some of them, both good and bad, and get a feel for the game.  There are also probably reviews up on Youtube by now.

A lot of people come here for trusted opinions. I like to think we give more reliable impressions than steam reviews on average. I'm sure Flick is aware there are external sources of review.

Thanks Jar, I come on here because I trust these guys :)

Mug!  :P

LOL

[Gusington]

'An expectation mismatch' - The Wife has used that on me :/

[Pete Dero]

Use code 'STARCONTROL' to get 55% off : https://www.voidu.com/en/star-control-origins

(might be region based)

[Jarhead0331]

Use code 'STARCONTROL' to get 55% off : https://www.voidu.com/en/star-control-origins

(might be region based)

It is. God damn it! Americans are always getting screwed!

...although, only $19.40 on Kinguin.

[Gusington]

I still don't know what to think of Kinguin. Gray market...or worse?