Star Command Galaxies

I remember playing and replaying the original over and over again. It was one of my favorite IOS games and still is to this day, despite it being a bit of a broken record of a game. I was excited by the little teaser the original game had at the end, about pirates and stuff, but was sad when it never came to fruition. Then one day recently, I was feeling nostalgic for the old Star Command when I discovered this on Steam and downloaded it right away. After playing through the whole game I have some thoughts, some good, some bad... The Good: It has the same lighthearted humorous dialog and story as the original. You can TELEPORT to other ships which you never could in the original. The different weapons are really cool and add great variety to your Tactical crew members. I didn't get to try out any of the different ship weapons but there are a lot more than 3 like in the original, and other new ship systems, like a health/energy stealing ray. I really like the inventory idea, with the ship being a big inventory to stash your weapons, scrap, and other treasure. The Bad It crashes. A lot. I once had to restart a single mission 7 or 8 times before I finally got lucky and didn't have the game die on me. Its short, painfully so. There are 2-5 missions in each sector, but not enough variety in the missions. Also there are usually two branches that you can take, but I can't go back to another branch once I go down the other, which cuts the number down by at least 2 missions. They all seem random, which is good, but there's not enough variety. Something I really liked about the original is that you could go to any mission whenever you wanted. You didn't have to do all the missions, but if you wanted to have enough tokens to upgrade your ship, you would want to do them all, even if it was a hard mission and you might lose somebody. In Galaxies, I can skip some of the missions and actually be better for it. I almost always bribed the Pirates, or accepted their bribe, because the reward for fighting them was not worth it. Of course, if you do it too much, you can end up having 5 Rebel ships attack you at once, which was exciting and probably the most fun I had during the game. Trying not to die against 5 enemy ships boarding you while firing at you and stealing your energy made it quite stressful. Or I could just give them a bed and have them all leave me alone. I was surprised to learn Galaxies has been in development almost since the original came out. For almost 10 years of development this seems like very little content, and for $15 it's probably not worth it. The original was $3 and I had countless hours of fun from that game, yet I can't see myself replaying this one at this point. There's just not enough there. I could have beat the game in maybe 5 hours if not for all the crashes, since you can only save at a space station, which you can only get to AFTER you have completed all the missions in a given area, so if the game crashes on the last mission, which it did, frequently, then you have to do all the previous missions over again, only to have it crash on the last mission. Again. (It's the 2nd to last one, the Rebel station. Something about my grenades or moving all the crew at once, or loading enemies or something caused it to crash over and over again). There are 3 aspects of the original that I really like which are lacking in Galaxies. 1. Despite it being also very short, the original got harder every time you beat the game, making it fun and engaging to play again and again. There doesn't seem to be a difficulty setting in Galaxies, meaning this is impossible. It's the same game again and again. 2. The original had multiple aliens you could hire or get onto your crew. In Galaxies, I can only have humans, which are boring. I want Midorians, and Trilaxians, and Avains, and Antorians, and the new ones like the Octorons and the Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle dudes, God I want one of those! 3. The original had multiple different paths depending on the dialog you selected. Sometimes you would get a crew member of one alien race or a different one depending on the path you took. Sometimes you would rescue the princess, sometimes you would let the Ants have her and the Midorians would hate you for it. The little differences presented by the dialog options provided ample opportunity to for replayability, because if you're like me, then you want to know what each option does and how it affects the game. Galaxies does not have this and I was surprised by that, given that it is such an integral part of the original. Ideas for improvement: Weapons locker: Somewhere to stash your weapons so they aren't cluttering the floor would be great. Crew Hit-box is slightly to large/tall. Many times I tried to select one guy and I would select the wrong one, even though I was clicking on the right guy. I ended up clicking on the portraits more often than not, and even then sometimes I would have to double click a crew member before the previous selection was cleared. More missions/more game after I win. The story ends way too quickly. I want to hire aliens in my crew, I want a bigger ship with more crew, I want to interact with the Midorians and travel around with a fleet of battlecruisers and crush the rebel scum! I want to teleport onto alien planets and explore the galaxy! It sounds like the devs want to add more content, so please, DO IT! \ Also fix the crashes. Please, I'm begging you. If you've made it this far I commend you! I want to be clear, I'm not hating on the devs. I WANT this game to be great and better than the original. And it definitely could. Star Command Galaxies has great potential, but needs a lot of work. Would I recommend it? In its current state, no. It's not worth $15, maybe not even $5. But I WANT it to be. And I hope with this review, maybe this will help the devs take another step towards getting there.

Insanely buggy, it's common to have to replay an episode multiple times due to restarting the game and no checkpoints within episodes. Quite frustrating because the gameplay and story are quite good actually and nostalgic.

Cannot recommend, only played for 4 hrs and have seen so many damn bugs. Invisible ships/enemies, not targeting or attacking at all when boarding ships, repeated dialogue. Unplayable.

almost unplayable, remember playing this on my old android device years ago. not the same

So many bugs its practically unplayable.

It will be finished and when that happens it will be glorious. It just takes time. Thanks to the devs for not abandoning the game. Takes time to grow

I want to love this game so badly, but it's currently in bad shape. Also, the whole steam page is out of date. The devs had to swap the open-world design for a more linear format that matched the prequel that came out on mobile devices due to (probably, if I'm understanding correctly) a lack of resources. It's a shame because I LOVED the first game and had been dying to one day be able to afford to get this game. The game also has a major memory leak issue wherein it'll start to use up all of your RAM if you don't close it after every "mission" you complete. If they ever get around to fixing the major bugs, and also bring back the open world design which was shown prominently all over the store page, then I'll most likely change my review.

Game is bugged. Cannot even get through the tutorial as there is no way to hire new crew members. Nothing happens when you click on them.

abandond

-it is astonishing how FALSE a game's trailer can be, and how AWFUL a game is while having a cool trailer. -no ability to disable edge panning -default controls are 100% backwards to standard controls with NO key mapping available -UI scale is unreadable at 2560x1440, with no UI scaling or font size settings available. -awful graphics beyond the style, like blurriness as if a photo has been aquire by taking a photo of the screen itself type of bad because this game is trash here are two other games to consider that are awesome and actually playable: https://store.steampowered.com/app/979110/Space_Haven/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/799600/Cosmoteer_Starship_Architect__Commander/