Star Control®: Origins

It's fun, just not totally optimized on the UI side. Great memories of Star Control games of old for sure.

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This is a thumbs up, but a very weak one. Never played the originals. There's just not enough meat in core gameplay to sustain 20+ hours. Game gets very repetetive. Also the credits soon lose any meaning as theres not enough money sinks, I got over 300k by the end. The various bizzare aliens you meet are often hillarious (including the voice acting) and there is a lot of various alien ships that join your fleet, to try in combat. No bugs or technical problems were encountered worthy of mentioning.

As a teen, I spent countless sleepless nights glued to the screen playing Star Control 2. Along with games like Starflight, it sparked a love for a very specific space exploration RPG niche, a genre that felt ignored for far too long. While we did get Star Control 3 back in the day, I, like most fans, wasn't a huge fan of it. Star Control: Origins finally steps up to fill that massive gap while we all wait for Free Stars: Children of the Infinity. Because of real-world legal battles, the game features a almost entirely new cast of alien races (though a few familiars like the Arilou make an appearance). Honestly, though? It works out for the better. Starting fresh means you get to experience genuine "first contact" moments with strange, unknown species, which is exactly what this genre is all about. The Spathi will always be classic, but the Tywom aren't too shabby either! A huge chunk of the fun is landing on strange, often dangerous planets to gather resources. The planet lander controls are fantastic; it might not be the Mass Effect Mako, but it handles its own incredibly well and feels great to pilot. Let's be clear: this isn't a AAA title. You aren't getting groundbreaking, cutting-edge graphics or a multi-million dollar Hollywood orchestral soundtrack, but it doesn't need them. It’s a beautifully colorful, fun game with a highly satisfying story that never takes itself too seriously. If you are a fan of old-school space exploration RPGs, I cannot recommend this enough. It’s just plain fun.

It's a pretty good game, yeah. I liked it. PROS: Gods, it *feels* like Star Control 2 (positive) it looks great and sounds great The writing is fantastic and witty The story is pretty good, and side quests are fun The alien design, art, and voice acting are all also excellent The exploration is all there: it's thrilling to find a new alien or planet with lots of minerals and not a lot of things that'll kill you There's a lot of fun easter eggs for veterans Pretty serviceable quest log and journal that records all the places you're supposed to go CONS: If you're looking for all your old friends from SC2, you may be disappointed The story and side quests are all pretty linear, "go to x star or search x star cluster to find the thing, or talk to the guys. There's not a lot of mystery or puzzling required. The story had some interesting bits, but if you're doing side quests and exploring, you're going to be very overpowered by the final act, and it'll probably go past you too quick and easy. You can hear the post-processing on some of the alien voices, and it might distract you. A few, minor quality of life features would have been nice to have, though nothing frustrating enough to drive me away. With a fairly modern gaming PC and solid state drive, it still takes like two full minutes to load into the main menu. Not a deal-breaker, but very weird, and irritating.

Great recreation of one of the best "early era" PC games.

I think "Star Control: Origins" is worth trying. I didn't stick with it very long, though. I do think the game was "made with love." There's a lot of humor in it, and the art direction has nice whimsy. For me, though, the core loop didn't really work out. I think "SC:O" is meant to be a joy-of-exploration thing, but I didn't get that much enjoyment from flying place to place and landing on planets. The getting from star system to star system quickly becomes tedious, because there didn't seem to be much to find in hyperspace. (Depending on where you're going, there's a LOT of hyperspace.) Then, when you get to a system, visiting the various points of interest ends up seeming like just a bunch of "checking the boxes." There are special things to find, but many of them end up showing the marker which means "an interesting thing is here, but you can't resolve it yet." The markers accumulate to the point where they aren't a meaningful indicator of where you've been, and you don't get quest log entries about them in most cases. It's difficult to self-direct your travels when there isn't an easy way to determine where you think you'll find something new. The planetary exploration is a nifty idea that didn't really pan out for my tastes. You get this rover that you can drive around and collect things with, and you can equip it with a weapon for combat. It's all fine in theory, but the repetition and frustration get in the way. The real point isn't the scenery, but rather to hunt down these resources dotted all over a planet. The trouble is that all the planet - and the lander controls - end up doing is impeding the process. This isn't like the original "Mass Effect" Mako, where terrain could be fun and comical. What it works out to is a lot of teeth grinding as your bouncy lander won't go where you want, and constantly requires you to jump to avoid terrain features that it hangs up on. And if you get into a planet-side fight, your lander is VERY fragile, which means trying to stay at long range. And THAT means fighting with how your projectiles fly over the surface in a curve. It's actually clever! But again, I just felt like the fiddling around with the laser was an obstruction and not a fun diversion. Similarly to all that, the space combat system didn't really work out for me. There are other games of this general type that seamlessly integrate the space-flights and the space-fights. To make the fleet system work, though, "SC:O" encounters get resolved in their own sort of mini game. There's nothing wrong with that as a basic choice, but the way it works out is to break the flow of your exploration to dump you into an arena where clunky, Newtonian flight, and imprecise weapons combine to create yet another feeling of "I really wish this would just get out of the way." I'm one of those folks where the interlocking systems of this title simply failed to interlock in a way that was engaging for me. Other players love this thing from top to bottom. You may as well find out which camp you're in.

So much better than Starfield.

I love this game and the original Star Control 2 it is trying to improve upon. Some of the same spirit exists, but despite being graphically superior and having a more organized and streamlined plot, it has lost much of the spirit from the original, which is clearly still better, despite being over 20 years older. Some of the achievements are also bugged and from the comments, have clearly been that way for around 3 years and Stardock seems to not care to fix them, even though they are aware of them. Multiple years of poor/slow/failing support for achievements they know are broken but are too "busy" to fix doesn't look good. Care about your product all the way please. Honor Paul's hard work and vision, don't make players go through a weird process to get an earlier version of the game when the achievements still worked instead of fixing it.

10/10 Game (tasteful humor as a cherry on top) Love it. Cant stop playing it. Really one of a kind.