Starcom: Unknown Space

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Hours played at review time, across 818 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

Starcom: Unknown Space is a tremendously fun top-down space exploration game in the style of Star Control 2. There are a lot of other top-down space games that seem superficially similar, but Starcom stands apart because of the strong storyline and lore. It's more serious than Star Control but also there isn't any time or fuel pressure and aside from one virtually-impossible encounter that has an alternative solution, the combat is very manageable so it's way more chill. Even though the game includes resource gathering, trading, a research tree, a ship designer etc, at its core this game remains primarily a narrative adventure. The biggest flaw is that the pacing slows down quite a bit toward the mid/end game. Once you have solved most of the missions and uncovered most of the main storyline, there are a few dangling plot threads and unresolved conflicts - some of which block progression - that are tough to figure out without looking for hints or a walkthrough. It wouldn't be so bad if there were more planets to scan, more artifacts to collect, more "filler" content that might help to keep the galaxy feeling lived-in, but once you cleared almost everything out you are left searching your logs and flying back and forth between places you already visited to try work out what you missed. The game does try to prompt you with crewmembers suggesting you check something out again, but maybe a few more of those hints wouldn't go astray, perhaps structured like they are in Mass Effect where you have to explicitly talk to members of your crew to ask them if you missed something. Still, for an indie game, that this is even in the same conversation as Mass Effect is a great achievement. Plus it runs on internal graphics, which is great if you don't have a beefy gaming PC. If you're into oldskool sci-fi, Big Dumb Objects, ancient civilizations, exploring the stars... Starcom is fantastic. Highly recommended.