Please note I have gotten the game during a giveaway for free.
Starpoint Gemini 2 is one of the most fun games I have played, as well as one of the most frustrating and disappointing.
The graphis aren't anything special, not even for the year it came out, but I never really cared about that, so it has no impact on my opinion of the game. The designs of the ships, stations and planets are pretty varied and pretty decent, but again - nothing special. The storyline is meh, the main goal of it, as well as of the side story missions, is to teach you how to play the game. Some of them are a bit more challenging than what you will generally find while flying about the Gemini System, but most are at the same level as random encounters, if not even easier. The story itself is fairly predictable for the most part, simplistic, and can be ignored for its entirety.
The sandbox is pretty big and fairly varied with opportunitues for mining, salvaging fighting and trading, as well as some simple mission running - and is most definitely the main part of the game. It offers a variety of stations and planets with different focuses and offered, as well as wanted goods. The game also boasts a surprisingly high amount of various factions holding these planets and outpost, but the interaction with them is fairly limited and the reputation system is very simple and completely basic - you simply get overall reputation points and based on your amount, the factions will either like you, be neutral, or be hostile - with some being hostile no matter your reputation. This is in direct clash with some story missions or side story mission which have you fighting for one faction against another, but you won't lose the good graces of that faction despite thrashing their ships because both are on the same side of the "good" or "bad" factions, which I find completely stupid...
Now, to the most fun part of the game - the fighting. Fighting is fairly complex and offers a variety of approaches and fairly large pool of equipment, which allow for even the starting ship the players gets to remain relevant even in "endgame". It rewards skillful play and it can be very punishing. I founf it really enjoyable, figuring out the best setups, and the setups hostile factions use, etc. If you want a challenging fighting without overly complicated controls, this game has you covered.
There are some other issues with the game, however - some design choices which seem to be out of 1914 and not 2014 - you can't save outside of stations and when you die, you got to load from the last save instead of say, respawning with a starter ship, which wouldn't be a problem for me - it brings more challenge ot the game - you risk it without going to rearm and save in the station for quicker and bigger profit? You screw up? Have fun with your last save that is two levels ago and with 25% less money - actions have consequences.
However, there is one thing that turns the whole save thing into an absolute nightmare and makes the game entirely unplayable - there is a bug in the game, and from what I have seen, it has been around almost since release, which makes your ship selfdestruct for no reason. The developers claim it has been fixed a long time ago, but a simple Google search reveals a string of forums threads and posts, including steam community, complaining about this problem for years. Going through my log file, as well as the log files and posted parts of log files, the issue seemed to have one cause - spawning of ambushers/bounty hunters. Opening the files and going through them, I noticed one thing - all of them had the "AttackPlayer" variable, my guess being to aggro them to player right as they are spawned. With this, I came up with two explanations - the ambushers spawn and autofocus the player, firing everything right away and simply kill the ship before even properly rendering, the fabled 1 frame kills which can be found in some games - or, the second option, the variable makes them spawn really close to the player, using normal aggro, but basically pushing the ships so close that there is low chance of aggroing on anything else, in which case the one frame kills could be a result of the spawning being broken, making the hostiles spawn within player's ship, freaking out the game and simply blowing up everything.
Deciding one the hamfisted approach first, I simply deleted that variable from the scripts related to the ambushers. This gave me a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of errors in the logfile everytime the ambush script was used, but the ships spawned without issue some 1000 units away from me, gave their one liner and then either aggroed on me or flew away. I am still not completely sure, but it looks like the spawning was broken and this fixed it. The ships would spawn in vicinity, but not right on top. Granted, sometimes it would break the aggro, but still better than simply being blown up every ten minutes, right? Besides, I could fish through the game files and maybe fix or replace the variable later and have the ships start spawning close up again. All was well, I tested the game for a couple of hours and it worked just fine. I didn't have the time to go screw around with the files in hunt for "AttackPlayer", nor did I really feel like doing it because I was too tired from work.
Instead, I jsut fired the game up today and simply played around for a bit, hunting some pirates for lulz and lootz in my Prowess. Until I blew up again. From the loot spawning. Well, good thing is that it confirms something ♥♥♥♥♥ is going on wth the spawning, but if all of it is broken, it will take a lot of work to fix. And tell me, why the ♥♥♥♥ should I fix the game for the devs? I'm really glad I didn't pay for the game. I simply uninstalled it, don't think I will ever play it again, since new game in the series is out and I doubt the devs care enough to actually fix it if they didn't in 4 years - or maybe they don't even know how to fix it.
Final rating - 0/10 - Completely unplayable.
If you absolutely have to play an SG game, try the new Warlords, it should have at least some dev support, this one is broken, and the first one is apparently even worse mess of bugs.
P.S.: Forgot the soundtrack - it's meh. Doesn't make you want to puke, but it's generic sci-fi soundtrack vol. 25...
