Starcom: Unknown Space

This game is fun as hell. My only thing is that there is a need for a New Game +. Desperately.

This is a great and engrosing game. Took about 40 hours to complete, probably could have speed run it much faster but I was enjoying the journey.

I was searching for something new, and fell on Starcom. It's certainly not a bad game. I enjoy exploration games, so in that regard it's right up my alley. However, this gets repetitive and boring in very short order. Ship design is by far the most exciting aspect of the game, but even that is rather small in scope. Honestly, I'd give this game a neutral review if I could.

Enjoyable space exploration, combat and shipbuilding. The what-to-do-next mission interface isn't perfect. It mostly works, but there were a few times I really wanted a better built-in journal. For example you get shown a crude star map at one point and you just have to remember it. Or google it. Still enjoyable though.

Similar to Star Control 2. Combat is too easy/bland. Adding some depth to combat (rock-paper-scissors) would help. Instead you just strap on the highest dps weapon and that's it. Races and conversation could be better fleshed out.

[h1]Starcom Unknown Space[/h1] Starcom Unknown Space (Starcom) is a little gem of a game that focuses on exploration, ship-building and a bit of story over hardcore action mechanics. And I, for one, appreciated that focus. It's a bit like the Space Rangers game in that way, though that game focused much more on trading with deeper combat system while this one is a bit more casual with easy real-time combat. Since this isn't a well-known title, I'll go into a bit of the gameplay loop. You pilot a single ship throughout a strange solar system, uncover and interact with sentient alien life as you explore the mysteries of this unknown area of space. Travel, which is a core mechanic in this type of game, is done very well with numerous jump gates and "flingers" that fast-transport you from one system to another. So you rarely - but occasionally - have to spend 5-10 minutes of your life watching your ship inch across the screen to continue your exploration. You scan the planets, which are conveniently close together, and occasionally have a dice roll to see how your crew reacted to a particular situation. As you uncover more and more of this area of space, you'll interact with both friendly and unfriendly alien species. You'll have a couple of dialog choices for the friendly ones. The unfriendly ones will attack you on sight. Combat, which has a difficulty slider when you start the game, is fun and not too difficult. If you're looking for a hardcore tactical space combat sim, this isn't the game. You can automate some weapon systems or fire manually but the combat isn't really too much different than the very old Asteroids game from the 70s. You move, you turn, you shoot and - if you're losing - you try to escape. I suppose it gets a bit more tactical and detailed if you turn up the difficulty slider but I'm more interested in exploring and I don't want to get frustrated from repeatedly dying. So I turned down the slider bit when I started my game and the combat felt entertaining and engaging without being overly punitive. You'll pick up resources along the way, whether by finding them on planets you scan, destroying ships or the occasional asteroid field. You'll also uncover research that you can use to unlock new technologies in a surprisingly large tech tree. Both of these systems combine into the ship building part of the game, which is really intuitive and fun. You can build bigger and better ships and add to your existing one. Different engines, different weapon systems, shields, scanners, fighters, missiles, armor - all the normal stuff is represented here. Building up your ship allows you to dive deeper into more dangerous territories and it's quite satisfying to come back to a system where you got curb stomped and just roll over those enemies in your nice, shiny new enhanced ship. My only real complaint here is that the resource constraints are a bit too much at times, so even at the end I couldn't really build the ship I wanted due to lack of certain minerals. Now I might have been able to trade for those minerals with some of the friendly aliens, since trading is a thing here. But I think this is one of the missed opportunities in Starcom. The lack of a really decent system to track the prices all over the galaxy makes trading more a way to get certain minerals that are hard to come by and not really a system you'd use to get more powerful. I really enjoyed this part of Space Rangers and I'd like to see it fleshed out a bit more here, giving the game an additional, interesting but optional system for players to engage with. The graphics won't win any awards but they're plenty fine. The planets are colorful, players can set the colors of your ship, space isn't just all black and the menus are bright and easy to understand. The scale is pretty well done here and I felt a bit in awe when I came across certain landmark artifacts in space. I'd have liked to see a bit more in swirling nebulae but in general I have no real complaints about the graphics or art. This game is really easy to pick up and I appreciated how straightforward the UI and menus were. The music wasn't awesome but what there was of it was fine and spacy enough and didn't bore me. The writing and story won't win awards but they were well done and the overall tale was imaginative. There are a fair amount of quests in this game and one complaint of mine is that sometimes the quest log text was a bit too obscure for me to understand the next step. I get this is a game about exploration in unknown space and so giving away too much would also be detrimental but I found myself having to comb the web trying to figure out what to do next. At one point i thought I was truly stuck but managed to find the one system that moved the plot towards conclusion. I will say the developer is very active on the Steam forums and he helps get players unstuck and I want to give major props to him for being so attentive to players. i had another episode where I really did get stuck though and had to use console commands. There's a certain spot where you need to use some space debris to move the plot forward. My issue is that I had destroyed that space debris about 10 hours earlier in the game because destroying space debris generally gives goodies I can use to build a bigger ship. So imagine my consternation when the only way to move the main quest forward was to use that non-existent debris. Luckily I found a console command that allowed me to skip by that issue but that was really the only really poor game design I uncovered. I didn't encounter any bugs or crashes. Finally, I also appreciated the game didn't overstay its welcome, at least not much. The first 2-3 hours are a bit slow but I found them engaging enough to continue. Then I was into the meat of the game, solving quests, meeting aliens and working on my ship. That started to get a bit stale but as I ticked off quests, I slipped right into the endgame. That was a bit annoying with a bit too much running around but overall the game's length of about 25-30 hours feels right. Any longer would have started to be a real drag. Since I got this at 50% off ($12.50 USD), I definitely feel I got my money's worth out of it. I'm not sure there's much replayability here though. There's no randomness to this universe the best I can tell and my choices really didn't have much meaning, so I'd just be doing the same thing again but knowing generally where all the planets already are. Without that exploration aspect, I think this might get dull fairly quickly. So while I'd strongly entertain a DLC or I might play it again once I forget where everything is, this is probably a one-and-done game for me. But it's still fun and worth my money and time. Recommended but maybe wait for a sale.