Starpoint Gemini Warlords

I write these reviews to remind me of why this game is in the "bad game" folder. I thought I’d try this since someone told me it was Mount & Blade in space. They lied. The game has level scaling, so you never really progress. Level scaling is what lazy, bad devs do. Why add levels to a game when they mean nothing? The game has no real economy. Location X always spawns a fixed amount of resource Y at price Z, and it never changes. Just leave, dock again, and everything is restocked. Combat is awful. It’s really hard to keep track of what’s going on. The third-person combat is very poor, all fights take place at point-blank range because the AI is a joke. I don't know why devs think that people would be so careless and wreckless with spaceships. WW2 warships would engage at over 20 miles away but for some reason the devs think space combat starts at 5km... The ships have no roles, so there’s no point building anything other than the biggest one you can. I have no real control over the fleet, other than telling them where to go. There are no tactics involved, just have more HP and guns to win. As for building, you just capture nodes and upgrade them. To get resources, you’re endlessly sending ships on missions every 2–3 minutes. This gets tedious and boring really fast. Moving around the map is a chore, with never-ending pirates. The story isn’t very engaging — it’s cliché and predictable. I honestly can’t find a single positive in this game. I completed the story and have no intention of ever playing this garbage again.

If you love playing Freelancer, you might like this game. I have been searching for a game that come close to the standard that Freelancer set years ago. This game did just that with some flaws. I am very hesitate to give this game a thumbs down because it did tried it best. It was a great attempt and I am looking forward to more improving in the next one. I wanted to make a pros and cons list but every good thing about this game comes with something bad. So here is the run down: - LOVE the idea of boarding an enemy ship and having a chance at capturing the ship for resource, money, or to build one yourself. Hate how tedious it is. The boarding process is a minigame itself, and you have to be close enough to do it. Which means you have a choice: Enjoy the cool space battle or board the ship. Boarding ship takes time during a battle and distract you from the battle. And after a while, it really gets super board-ring and made me wish there is an auto boarding option so I can spend more time fighting and less time boarding. (You don't have to always board during fights, but you miss out on resources, new ships, etc.) - LOVE the idea of capturing planets and turning it into something similar to Sins of a Solar Empire where you capture sections of the map for resource, build buildings in them, and contest them. Hate how weak the mechanic is. Fleet limit so small that in high difficulty, you spend more time defending your many fronts than you do expanding your empire. It doesn't helps that "quick travel" using gateways aren't that useful because the game choose where you can build them. It hard to enjoy a large map when it takes so long for your ships to move any where on it. - LOVE the more detailed equipments. Similar to Freelancer, you can upgrade your grabling, your engine, etc. But all equipment upgrades are so shallow and vague. Half of the stats on the equipments aren't listed. For example, take 2 railguns, one of them have a higher dps listed than the other. So naturally you would want the one with higher dps right? Well.... if you look at the game file, you will see the higher dps gun have lower shield dmg than the other one. So realistically, the other one is a better gun. But there is no way to tell in game. The gun list 1 single number and does not break down shield vs hull dmg. Same with enhancements, not enough varieties. In Freelancer, every station sells a different equipment, ship, weapon based on their location, type of station, and faction. In this game, you really don't care about any station or planets. There is none of that fun feeling of discovering a new planet and getting excited to dock so you can look at the cool new things they offer. Because at the end of the day, your HQ have everything you captured. Took the fun out of finding new planets. And to make it worst, all the endgame weapon you can have from just doing endgame research that takes a ton of resource. There is no need to go find endgame weapon in dangerous areas through enemy drops or docking into a station/planet in high level area. In the end, there is only 1 right way to build your ship (no matter which ship you choose to fly). Absolutely no room for creative build. - Leveling sucks. But not the way you think. The game give you experience for anything you do, from making money, to doing repetitive quests, to killing random enemies. On my first playthrough, I went for a couple trading runs and found I can shot up in level very quickly. Why is that a problem? Because in most games, when the enemies get tough and you have a hard time progress, you take a moment to do some resource farming so you can buy better equipment, but not this game. Your money making will level you up. So enemies continue to scale a head of you and there is no way you can catch up to it. Because if you farm money to buy better ships and equipment, guess what, that money caused you to jump in level and now enemies are now stronger than the upgrade you were planning to buy for yourship. So your best bet is to do trading runs until you can get the best endgame equipment before you starts some real space fights. - Space fights. I wanted to love it but man does it suck. The mechanic of this game made the spacefights into a war of attrition. Your ship piloting skill will not let you win against a strong enemy. You simply cannot take down a Dreadnought while flying a gunship. The shield, hull, etc scaling is too strong. Which is realistic, but also means that in this game, you can't choose between which ships you want to fly, eventually you will have to go with the tankiest, most weapon slots ship if you want to progress. Although there are a variety of ships, in the end you really only have 2 or 3 choices. And if you google what is the best Dreadnought, there is one clear answer. I wish the fights were more interesting, more dodging, more skill, but it pretty much just line up and spam heavy weapon until someone go down. - Looting is by far the worst thing ever. When ship dies, it drop loots. But sometimes it also drop derelic. and if you want to loot the derelic, you have to buy and equip a consumable item. So, here is how tedious the process is. Imagine going into a nice large battle against say, 30 enemies. After they all dies, there are around 10 derelic floating around for you to get. Mind you, this is the only way for you to have a chance at getting whatever weapon those ship was using (which isn't much, you get better weapon at your HQ). for each derelic, you need to get in range, select it, activate your consumable, watch the stupid animation of your ship sending out the salvaging swarm, and then you need to wait a few seconds before the derelic is consumed and you allow to loot it. so imagine doing that 10+ times. each battles. In a game that focuses on killing ships and looting. THAT, is tedious. But wait, there is more! They give you a Titan ship that can "auto" loot. So what that means is that whenever derelic drop, the ship auto send out the salvage swarm for free (as long as you are in range), and then after a few seconds, you can loot. Sounds good right? No more individually selecting derelic and sending salvage swarm out. Well, they screw it up. There is only 1 ship that can do that. You HAVE to be piloting it (can't let an AI fly it), AND THAT SHIP IS THE WORST THING TO PLAY WITH. it is large, slow to move, and overall makes the game less fun if you want to use it. So now the choice is between making the game less fun by the tedious derelic looting or making the game less fun by flying that autoloot titan ship. I can go on. But the review is long enough. Every mechanic in this game is cool, until you play it enough and you realize how dumb the execution was. Overall, a great attempt at a space game. TONS of good idea. just poorly execute. I do have to give points to the devs for staying active in forum an make changes constantly based on player feedback. But boy, does this game have some fatal flaws. I really wanted to like this game. I played 50+ hours but still can't like it. But they have a good thing going and I look forward to the improvements in the next game.

Disclaimer: I didn't play through the story, I only played sandbox mode. So I have no comments on the story. Ok, so, Starpoint Gemini 2 is like freelancer, where you go around and the focus is on your single ship. I bought it during the summer sale, and it was great, however I got to endgame and realized you couldn't capture stations or planets, which left me wanting more. So, I looked into the next game in the series which was Warlords. I realized I could do everything I wanted in this game, while still being able to deck out my ship and customize everything. I started playing in sandbox mode, roleplaying as the Emperor of Mankind, the goal being to conquer every last bit of the gemini system. It was a bit confusing at first, but once I got the hang of the game, dear god did it deliver. It was great till I reached my fleet power limit, and I realized there was a cap on the number of ships you could have. That was not the experience I wanted. I wanted to build MASSIVE fleets and just absolutely destroy everything. Thankfully, this game has a lot of mods. One of the mods upped the fleet cap to 3 million, which was exactly what I wanted. I installed the mod and began building my fleets. I started declaring war, and taking over system by system by system. It was incredibly satisfying to purge Gemini of all lesser factions, and impose the will of the Emperor on everyone. The second issue was that ships are limited by your "rank" (level), so again I installed another mod to remove that cap, and started buying the best ships I could afford. When you buy ships, you can paint them (like in a paint program, not like a button that says "paint"). So eventually I got a Titan ship at around level 45, painted it gold, and stamped it with an empire decal. It was an absolute beast, and after I decked it out with the best weapons and upgrades I could find, it could take over stations all by itself, with my personal fleet there mostly just to clean up any ships trying to run from the battle. Again, this was very satisfying. As of today, I just captured the last regions in space, and completed the game. During my final conquests, I had "Calorus Rex" by Sabaton playing and it was glorious. The Imperium of Mankind is complete, and there are none that can threaten the Emperor of Mankind. The Emperor Protects. My final rating is, 8/10. Great game, had tons of fun. I recommend checking out the mod workshop and installing the mods to increase the fleet power cap, and ship rank requirements. That way you're truly allowed to do whatever you want provided you have enough resources.

As much as I hate to do it, I have to give this game a bad review. It is a complete and utterly buggy mess. 1. Your ships don't shoot their primary weapons...at anything. They just float around providing moral support. Occasionally they "might" fire their secondary weapons, but when enemy shields are up it does nothing. This is a HUUUUUUUUGE problem for a game that is advertised as building fleets. Well, technically you "can" build fleets, but what's the point when they just float around and don't FIRE THEIR FRIGGEN GUNS! This forces you to have to do all the work, while they cheer you on from the sidelines. When four dreadnoughts can't take down a single gunship, that's a problem. 2. Speaking of those ships, they like to ram into while you are in sub light speed. They will just swarm around like a bunch of angry drunk bees and slam into you, knocking you off course constantly while you hear a loud *THUNK* each time. This is...annoying. 3. There is a long standing issue where a music file during combat causes the game to stutter, badly. This has been known for years yet the devs never sought to fix it. Now that the game is abandoned, it is forever in purgatory. There ARE fixes for this bug, but you have to do it yourself. 4. This is the kicker; there are several missions that will stop your progress dead in it's tracks (especially in the DLC's). So you'll make all the progress, slowly, and then BAM...you get an objective and can't complete it even after you did EXACTLY WHAT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DO. Googling around shows others with the exact same issue...from 2018. Again, since the game was abandoned, this will never get fixed so you are basically screwed. Joy. I wanted to give this game a good review, and I played it a lot but I just can't with these glaring issues that were never corrected. Did the devs even play their own game? It's no wonder they are on life support now as a company with not finishing their products.

[h1]Welcome, Admiral[/h1] Starpoint Gemini Warlords (SGW) is a 4X, real-time strategy, with role-playing elements tied into a space simulator, where you command a fleet of ships to do as you please with the sector of space you’re given. Your colony is known as Solari Concord, which resides far from Imperial space. [h3]+Pros+[/h3] +Side missions +Bounties +Personalized fleet +Multitude of ways to customize your ship +Multiple genres that work – well enough [h3]-Cons-[/h3] -Resource management -Tedious late game -Not much of a story -Alien bugs [h3]Who’s in this sector, Boss?[/h3] There isn’t much of a story to this game. No background lore, no mention where your colony came from, who the other nations are, or why they’re fighting over this sector when an alien force just wiped out much of their Imperial space. I’m not sure if these factions care or not, but not enough information was given to explain the situation at hand. The character (that you create) will be working on a new battleship when, all of a sudden, a squadron of ships assaults the prototype. This is where your story begins. You’ll be blamed for this atrocity and will be given a small Warband to rectify your wrongdoing. From then on, you’ll explore a vast sector of space by doing missions, quests from your council members that represent not only your faction but other colonies, bounties, gathering resources, and so forth. Bounties are the big, bad people that rubbed your ship the wrong way in orientation at work. These contracts pay a good amount of credits, but they will make your life a living nightmare the higher you go up on that bounty list. Befriending your neighbors or warring on them is up to you - this is YOUR story (for the most part). Since the story is more about you and your accomplishments with the Solari Concord, most of the characters you interact with are forgettable. You’ll have a few allies that ‘ride or die’ with you as you venture across the sector, but the interactions are not there. Most of the time, members of the council will tell you to do fetch quests. [h3]We’re under attack![/h3] As mentioned earlier, you’ll be provided with a small Warband that eventually will turn into an armada. To do so, you’ll need to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate (4X). When exploring the vast darkness of space, you’ll come to find derelict ships, containers, and bands of pirates as you reap the rewards. Leveling up your captain will give you a limited amount of skills and a multitude of perks. These perks can help you barter more from trading, take less damage, have people align with your diplomacy, and many more options to give you your sense of role-playing. The skills are abilities that can be used with your ship: shielding from energy beams, ramming the enemy, or firing a barrage of kinetic weaponry, to name a few. Eventually, you’ll be entrusted to build outposts, manufacture additional ships, research technology, upgrade multiple aspects of not only your ship but the ships under your command, and many other options to improve your quality of life. Resource gathering is important because without it you cannot construct a navy, research higher-tier weaponry and ships, or maintain control over new sectors that you conquer. To establish influence throughout the sector, you’ll have to build outposts, radar sites, and have a second small fleet to keep pirates and other hostilities out of your region. The one problem with resource management is how you acquire materials. When comparing it to gas or ore, it’s so slow that I’ve gone idle in the game for several hours to play something else, only to come back and be able to purchase a few ships. In my story, I’m not the bad guy, so I’m not trying to conquer all the planets. Yet, this game either forces you to do that to obtain more materials or have you idly sit by waiting for weeks to pass. My guess is that I progressed too fast for my own good, thus with all the baddies either dead or allied, and with most of the bounties done, there isn’t much to do. This has made the later portions of the game rather tedious, doing the same missions over, and over, and over again! You come to a point in the game where you have to spend tens of millions of credits to fix up this weaponized space station. Cool. If I spent a lot of that money on a Titan class ship with all the bells and whistles, how am I going to spend the rest of my night? Grinding, and rather slowly at that. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2727272419 [h3]We’ve been hit, Sir![/h3] The UI can be confusing at first, with information regarding shield, hull integrity, ammo usage, cooldown rates, abilities, and so on. You can steer the ship manually, or control it from the sector map by right-clicking on the map – the latter being applied to your fleet and breaking them down into multiple squads or as one armada. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2727272276 The combat is nothing to write home about. At times, it’s annoying to have your fellow crewmen doing their own thing instead of concentrating on the biggest, baddest ship around. This becomes a headache when you fight against huge contracts such as the ‘Deadly Dozen’ or ‘The Liberated’ when they have their men pitted against your fleet. Unless I missed something in the tutorial, I don’t recall how to attack a specific target which would have been a blessing at times. There are a few bugs within SGW that can be game-breaking if you don’t have prior save files handy. Certain quests of the main storyline will not trigger. These are due to expanding too fast to other zones or because the game didn’t process the event at all. I would recommend placing a few saved files on standby. [h3]Darkness with a pinch of Stardust[/h3] The game’s visuals from the stars twinkling in the outer reaches of space, to the guns blowing up an enemy ship, and the fine details of every flying chunk of metal, look amazing. They didn’t hesitate to put some time and effort into making this game look stunning. Even if customizing your ship only improves the look of it (though you cannot add any details to your allies' spacecraft) they did an astounding job to make them stand out from your enemies and your armada. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2727271970 The audio, from the pew-pews to the boom-booms, sound amazing. The limited amount of voice acting that does happen has emotion, and gets the point across. I did not experience any lag, audio or visual hiccups, crash-to-desktops, or anything of that nature. The game runs smoothly at a consistent 144 FPS. [h3]Armaments[/h3] OS: Windows 10 CPU: i9-10900k GPU: GeForce RTX 3070Ti Ram: 32GB Storage: Evo 870 4TB (SSD) [h1]The Gemini’s Embrace[/h1] For the first few dozen hours that I put into this game, it has been a blast. I enjoyed the encounters, the missions, quests, the storyline, and even the overpowered bounties at times. I’ve had to reload multiple times, but I’m fine with that because no one can hear you scream in space. Unfortunately, if you play a certain “good” character, then expect to be bored out of your mind and be forced to do the same tedious missions over and over. With a game that supports role-playing elements, the characters that you interact with were forgettable and this shouldn’t be the case when you have allies within your fleet. The developers could have added a backstory or added additional content to know who some of these individuals are that serve within your armada. The game is a solid piece of work and for the most part –besides the bugs here and there- enjoyable. If you’re into 4X with some RTS and RP elements, I would give it a shot, but do save occasionally.

This game did one of the sins in games that I absolutely hate: Your enemies level up with you. 1) This game levels you up quickly, too quickly 2) in this game they do this sin by leveling up the mission difficulty as fast as your level. 3) this forces you to race to get the next big ship, instead of enjoying your current ship and upgrading the equipment on your ship. No, you can't upgrade your weapon or equipment slots because you leveled up so fast that now your missions are now much more difficult and require the next larger ship! I did NOT get to enjoy my brand new cruiser. And once i got a battlecruiser i was forced against carriers! I just wasted 19 hours on a game that punished me for spending more time on one ship.

Gameplay: 6/10 Story: 7/10 Graphics: 8/10 Performance: 6/10 Overall: 7/10 Starpoint Gemini Warlords (SPGW), like it's predecessor, Starpoint Gemini 2 (SPG2) is an arcade space combat and trading sim where you command large capital ships as opposed to smaller fighter craft. But unlike SPG2, SPGW has a 4x-lite twist where you conquer territories across the map, build fleets, manage resources and engage in diplomacy with the other factions. Sounds like an awesome idea, right? And you'd be correct. It's a great idea! But I think a disclaimer needs to be mentioned before proceeding with purchasing this game. I really need to highlight the "4x-LITE" bit. I've observed that a lot of people have purchased this game going into the same expectation as X3's own strategy mechanics, which are very deep and evolving. Some people have even bought SPGW thinking that it's something like single-player EVE. The 4x strategy in SPGW is extremely lite. You have 3 basic resources consisting of ore, gas and materials. Ore can be mined from asteroids, gas can be mined from gas pockets and materials can be scavenged from derelicts. You can either collect these resources manually or send out "civilian fleets" to collect it for you. Civilian fleets are invisible and you can't actually see them, nor can you see other faction's fleets and success is chance based depending on how many defenses you have in an area. In addition to that, you can use civilian fleets to trade resources with other factions depending on what you have a surplus in once you unlock the necessary component to do so. Allied factions will also gift you resources occasionally. In addition to those resources, you also have credits which can be gained through radiant missions, trading or capturing and selling starships. Lastly, you have a fleet cap number and cap on larger capital ships. All of this is dependent on the amount of territory and planets you possess. As far as mechanics go, it's very basic. The AI doesn't seem to be under the same rules as the player as far as I've noticed. For example, there is no way for the player to cut the AI off from resources or hinder their resource production in anyway except by claiming territory and while the AI can attack the player, they rarely seem to do so. At least as far as I've determined in the campaign mode. This doesn't make it a bad game though! But don't buy it and go into playing it thinking that it's a very deep level of strategy and space combat, otherwise you will be very disappointed. Compared to the previous SPG2, SPGW has also streamlined many of the space combat and trading mechanics. For example, trading is now static and prices on goods never change. The economy is no longer dynamic and it is very easy to become extremely wealthy long before the end-game. Smuggling also seems to be broken as illegal goods do exist in the game, but I've yet to have factions scan my cargo and do anything about my "illegal goods", even when I'm traveling around in a massive battleship that is impossible to not see on the sensors. But the biggest issue is that credits aren't important as they were in the previous title, being limited to only helping the player and procuring trade deals with various factions. It would be nice if credits could be used to complement a player's fleet, using credits to purchase the services of mercenaries like the previous game. Aside from this, combat is still much the same, although equipment is a lot easier to come by. As far as graphics are concerned, I would definitely rate them significantly better than SPG2. Starships do have a sense of scale now and you can seriously tell the difference between a small little gunship and a massive carrier. Planets and space stations now have actual 3D visuals and you are greeted to a nice little cutscene when landing on them, which is much better than the 2D artwork rendering (which while nice, felt hastily put together). The story is also a lot better compared to the previous game where I felt lost half way through the story. The game includes an encyclopedia if you wish to immerse yourself in the lore. Overall, I would definitely say that I enjoyed SPGW, but I'd say that I enjoyed SPG2 more. The previous title had a good balance between complexity and arcade features. The dynamic economy, smuggling, the fact that each ship held a role from the smallest corvettes that could out maneuver capital ships to cruisers with cloaking devices and carriers that sacrificed firepower for fighter/bomber wings. SPGW stream-lined A LOT and the lite-4x mechanics don't really make up for everything that was lost from the previous game. Does that make SPGW a bad game? Absolutely not. I still recommend it, but I do wish that SPGW was more of an extension of SPG2, rather than a new stream-lined game to the SPG series.

Adquirí el juego en oferta y vi que no estaba en español después de iniciarlo. Despues de media hora jugando para poder hacer la reseña puedo decir que el juego parece que esta bien, buena trama, buen manejo de la nave...... Pero ya uno esta cansado de que lo tomen por gilipoyas, voy a devolver el juego simplemente por el motivo de no estar en español. Y aunque esta en ingles bastante entendible, lo que no puedo tolerar esque una empresa como la de este juego te saque el juego base ingles y 6 traducciones, chino, entendible, mucho chino; ruso, me lo pienso, tambien hay mucho ruso; pero que me saquen traduccion del aleman y el frances que solo lo hablan en su pais, porque africa ni la voy a contar; pero lo peor de todo que te metan una traduccion al polaco, si señores, se han molestado en traducir al polaco el juego. Y el español que es uno de los idiomas mas hablados del mundo, ni se han molestado. Lo peor aun que al parecer no tienen la intencion de hacerlo, si quieren que lo compremos, pero no quieren traducirlo. En definitiva, de esta compañia (que ya se une a unas cuantas en mi lista negra) no pienso adquirir ni un producto mas. Aunque hablo ingles, es de agradecer que este en tu idioma, pero lo malo esque se molestan en traducir en idiomas que no dan nada y los que son millones ni se molestan. Buena estrategia comercial, si señor. Luego estan los subnormales españoles y latinohablantes que se quejan de la traduccion pero luego puntuan con buena nota el juego o les da un positivo. Pero tened un poco de cabeza so borregos. a todos estos juegos hay que darles un negativo aunque en la reseña pongamos que nos gusta. Somos mas que los que tienen traducido el juego a su idioma, vamos a dar ejemplo de union para que nos vayan teniendo en cuenta, si hacemos siempre eso que haceis, nunca se gastaran una parte del presupuesto en traducir nada al español. En fin, que espero recapaciteis y cambieis a negativa la reseña. yo lo pondre en rojo y devolvere el juego. Ya estoy cansado de esta clase de compañias. un saludo

I suppose this is... a decent enough game. I picked this up because a few people said "it's like Kenshi in space". I'm about 28 hours in at the time of review and I have to say I'm not seeing it. I've worked through the story missions and it's turned me loose to build and conquer as I please and as I expand my territory more and more I am getting the feeling like I've already seen everything the game has to offer and I'm just going to see more of the same going forward, except flying a bigger ship, and with more ships following me, firing stronger versions of the same wearpons I've had since the beginning of the game. The tech tree is fairly shallow (maybe at most 3 levels deep in any category) and doesn't unlock anything particularly new for the most part, it just makes the existing things "a little better". The space flight and combat is fairly simple. That's probably a good thing, because you probably lack the satisfying control scheme to fly your ship well enough to take on anything more complex than what it offers you. It will interest you at first but quickly become a pattern of setting your weapons to fire at will and just sit back and wait for combat to be done. Game content comes in the form of taking it upon yourself to fly around and attack various installations, or the same varity of freelancer jobs that repeat, or the same variety of 'random' encounters that pop up on your radar, all of which there seems to be at most 5 types of encounters in any of the categories. You can build, but only in the handfull of pre-determined locations. Despite being a space game, the universe is mostly 2D with a little room to fly up and down the z-axis. if you are itching for a space game and are still interested in giving this a try, grab it on an 80% sale and see if you like it. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just asserting that there are plenty of others that will satisfy what you're looking for WAY better, depending on what you're looking to get out of it. Stellaris, Elite Dangerous.. Homeworld.. X3/X4... FTL...