Starpoint Gemini Warlords

Game has an interesting idea and format; but seems to fail to execute on all fronts. 4x strat, big ship combat, research, building, and so on... All done very blandly. Full of bug from years back that take minutes to fix on your own with a bit of research (combat stuttering -> Fix a bad ogg file; stuck on a mission -> reset it in the save game sgs file to work correctly, and so on). Things the devs should have fixed in the four years since release, but I think they just gave up or started on their next project. Its not a bad game, but its not a good game either. Looks nice, controls are wonky as all can be, main campaign story is boring, there is no real challenge in the game. Just get a bigger ship and you'll win. Once you get to a titan, you can take on 50-60 ships at a time and barely lose any shields. Save your money and find a different game

You know the X series of games? X3: terran what ever the hell? Yeah, SGW tries to be that with NONE of the complexity. Can't even do trade routes. No manufacturing. No turret defence. Not even an invasion mechanic. Just get one of the old games and mod it to hell and back. It does look pretty though. And plays smooth. There is just nothing to do other than grind money and wait for resources.

Updated review after 40 hours of play: Game is still a solid 7/10. However, it has quirks I noticed that end up in disappointment after a while of play. Let me be clear I had fun with this game. Even picked up the DLC’s on sale. However it just falls short somehow overall. Examples: -The Illusion of big fleet battles- The novelty is great until you start to notice something later in the game. 1. As your ship gets bigger everything gets smaller. Battles degrade into Square indicator boxes smashing together with an unreadable radar. The worst offender is how you can’t make out any turret fire unless you zoom way in. At that point you can’t see your ship's stats and it takes up so much of the screen you can’t watch any dog-fighting. Speaking of… 2. I noticed that it doesn't seem like ships do any actual fighting unless you are within a certain distance of them. I’ll watch in the distance as a tiny gunship is surrounded by much larger ships but does not take any damage. As soon as I approach, it's like the AI turns on and the tinny ship MELTS in a second. The ships are not that far away and you notice it worse when attacking stations. It’s as if only things within a radius of your ship partake in combat. It makes you have to lug your ship over across the battlefield to take out smaller ships surrounded by your fleet not doing anything. 3. Let's go back to the turret fire. I spent a few hours trying to mod this into the game but I’m not a modder. I just WISH the plasma, and railgun rounds were more visible when you get bigger ships. You can see the beams but I mean the whole idea of a giant battleship is watching the show as you broadside other ships. Sadly, you end up having to guess if your ship is firing or angled right with any other weapon beside beams. You also can't see a fun lightshow as your army clashes. You also can't tell whats hitting you unless its a missile or a beam weapon. Conclusion: Pick it up on sale and have some fun for a dozen or so hours! I recommend the base game first. If you like it the DLC goes cheap too but I found that lackluster as well. No harm picking it up if you're interested like I was! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SG:Warlords does space battles well. It could use more feedback for what exactly is wrecking your ship before you realize you’ve been destroyed, but you can quicksave anywhere and try again so it’s not that bad. Some say the combat is simple. I find the fact you can actually watch all the beams, missiles, and explosions without gluing your eyes to the HUD a big plus. One big reason is a killer “fire at will” toggle that auto fires at enemies in range. There is an optional pause while in the context menu that I appreciate. You can use this to focus your autofire on one target that can be fired upon and the ones that can’t shoot at said target will auto fire at something else it can. The only thing you gotta learn is picking your targets and orienting your ship well. There are three classes with four abilities each that can be mixed and matched five minutes into the game with some money. They are so-so and kinda miss the mark with all playstyles but I’m sure you’ll find a few you like. The real letdown is the main class skill. It basically boils down to: More damage at long range, more damage at short range, better chance to crit. I feel this could have been better with options for defense but it is what it is. The storyline is insufferable and I’m sorry to the devs for saything this. After I did the first 30 mins of a tutorial I had to back out and start a new game on free roam. Even then the gemini pedia can answer all your questions and it even has in-game videos you can watch. Really helps the game out. I implore anyone who finds the story impedes the gameplay to stick out the first 15-30mins and then switch it up to free roam. As for free roam. It’s an odd start without the story as you can’t get a feel for your spot in the universe yet. Once you start operating your starting zone and flying around trading or freelancing quests, that's when you can start to establish a feel for the game. There is still a little story to be had as you can get officers to chat with. As far as I've seen there are no event stories for free roam, but I also didn’t get any DLC which seems to add a crap ton more content. For a little north of $7 with tax (on sale) the base game is a steal. BEWARE: I found the controller experience to be horrendous. K&M works well but I did initially want to use a controller. You will probably have to tweak things to your liking in the options but it’s a one and done thing. I’ve seen this on sale a bunch and hope it goes on sale again soon ‘cause I’d love to get the DLC. Solid 7/10 with a loss of one point for the story. Of which I’m again sorry for being so harsh on but I just could not stand.

It's a really tricky one for me. Warlords isn't terrible, it's also barely entertaining in my opinion. The graphics are nice enough, the game runs well, but space itself here is just quite boring to look at. The map is huge, but with barely anything to do. You can either take on freelance missions that are always the same (kill target, kill several targets, scan this, salvage that, deliver this), take on the INSANELY powerful bounties (seriously, the level 3 or 4 bounty gal just wrecked my entire mid-tier fleet in seconds, and there's like 15 more bounties above her), but the money isn't even worth the risk, to be honest. By the time you're able to take the higher ones on you don't need the money anyway, because you already have the highest tiers of ships. You can, of course, also just be a miner and/or trader, but the interface never did it for me, just like with the predecessors. If you want me to be a mining mogul, there has to be more here. And while you can build up your own mining "operations" and expand your territory, ultimately, this, also, is very boring, as it all takes place on the overview map. The entire UI needs some love as well, menues, nestled within menues, some pause the game, some don't. It's a bit messy. Thirdly, you can engage in piracy ... somewhat. Because to do that you'd actually have to find ships to pirate. My personal go-to is to get a seek and destroy contract, go there alone and just capture the ship. If they're similar to your level, you should be able to board them successfully, and earn a hefty sum, depending on the ship. I think you can basically also declare war on some parties, but I've never tried that. The story is better left forgotten. You're being presented with a few text boxes, and have to travel from A to B most of the time, then destroy stuff. That's pretty much it. I'm sorry, but Freespace did that better like 30 years ago. And while you're fighting in a capital ship in this game, I'm sure you could've come up with something more engaging. I stopped playing 3/4 through, because now the game just wants me to invest MILLIONS of resources into research and development. Without cheating this just arbitrarily extends the game's story by dozens of hours ... or you just leave the game running in the background, letting your base accrue the necessary resources. Will only take a couple of days in real time, I guess. -.- I wonder why WE, the players, as well as the protagonist, actually have to pay for all of that ♥♥♥♥♥. I also don't know why we control the resource generation when we're clearly not the leader of this faction. It's all a bit confusing, but gameplay before immersion, I guess. In any case: Why did I stop and not soldier through? Because the game itself is rather boring. The combat does not evolve from commandeering a lowly corvette to a gigantic dreadnought. The ships do get bigger, yes, but that's about it. Combat stays the same. You have your abilities (yes, we need RPG abilities, of course, whether they make sense or not), and your equipment, like repair drones and shield strengtheners, etc. And you have your loadout, which consists of lasers, railguns, plasma weapons, and some missiles mostly. It's not exactly exciting stuff, and the presentation is rather lackluster. You will spend most of the time in battle trying to find the correct camera and movement angle to keep yourself alive, while also being able to attack the enemies. Without a fleet of your own you're pretty much wrecked anyway in later fights. Assaulting a station or a big fleet on your own is tantamount to suicide. So, that means even more R&D and building of ships, which of course all cost resources, which equals more padding to the runtime for those who just wanted to "enjoy" the story (there's really nothing to enjoy here, sadly). My point is that despite flying massive capital ships and commanding entire fleets I never felt like flying massive capital ships and commanding entire fleets. It might be, because of the camera angle, I dunno, but your ships look tiny, even most stations look tiny. Once again, I remember Freespace and how huge everything was. Granted, again, you were in a fighter not a capital ship itself, but still. You also can't really instruct your fleet to do anything, nor do you see them 95% of the time. And when you do they're some yellow speck on a black canvas. Same for the enemies. Mostly they're just red rectangles. And after a while even the sound of 10 lasers firing simultaneously gets old. Compare these ships here to, say, the WH40k universe with huge macro cannons firing broadsides in close quarters combat. Lasers zipping away over 10,000s of miles. Torpedoes being launched from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. Momentum actually meaning something. Now imagine controlling that yourself. Maybe even being on the bridge and coordinating the assault of dozens of ships, enemy raiders and worse constantly invading your system. Or having to fend of a Tyranid Hive Fleet, a Chaos incursion, etc. Edit: I've seen footage of commandeering a Titan class vessel, and that's the first ship where I think "damn, that's huge, and everyone else is tiny". That's the kind of escalation that could be fun. Alas, you have to suffer through endless hours of farming to get to that point (or play the tailor-made scenario, I think). It still doesn't change the gameplay though. You could make a game out of sth like this, in another universe even, but not here. Warlords is for those people who want to have a relaxing sandbox experience, maybe listening to podcasts, watching shows, etc. and doing some space mining/pirating/killing every once in a while. It's not a game for people who want to enjoy epic space battles and experience an engaging story. And the DLC doesn't really make that any better, sadly enough. So much wasted potential. Again.

TL;DR - Fairly fun, if simple, arcade space simulator with some annoying flaws. This game was my entry point into the Starpoint Gemini series. I had never played any of the games before, so I figured this was a decent place to begin. While the bones of a solid space RPG, 4X game are there, it gets to be a fair bit repetitive, especially in the campaign missions, mostly in some of the expansions. In the campaign, you start out with a mid-size Frigate or Carrier (forgot which) and your squad gets ambushed by a mysterious foe. After rescuing the commander of an experimental vessel, you take on the role of the commander, who was in previous Starpoint Gemini games, it seems, and begin your mission anew. Given an old Gunship, you must work your way up to fielding the larger ships in the game: Battleships, Dreadnaughts, and Carriers. You start out with limited territory and you must expand outward capturing stations, researching technologies, doing salvage, mining, sending civilian fleets to do odd jobs around the sector, as well as trade with your neighbor factions. As the story develops, the campaign story itself is... fine. It's not great, not bad either. Some of my biggest complaints about the game is that especially during the campaign they tell you to do something, but give you no indication how to do it. For example, you need to summon a giant ship that's supposed to help you conquer planets and it tells you that you need to lay a beacon for the ship to instantly teleport in. But they don't tell you how to do it. I was just aimlessly flying around fighting an infinite battle until I finally saw the outline of the ship placed in a random spot that wasn't obvious to see nor was the game indicating that's what needed to be done. When you use the ship during conquest, you have to sit and defend it against wave after wave of attack until it "charges" its weapon. It's just busy work and not really fun. You have to manually fire the weapon once it charges as well, which made no sense to me. It should be automatic, especially since the enemies keep coming until you do fire the weapon. There were a lot of missions where you have to kind of just guess how they want you to complete the mission because there's nothing that says how they want something done and there's nothing really guiding you on how to complete it. You may find yourself frequently getting stuck for a little while wondering how you are supposed to complete an objective. I also feel the RNG is a little unbalanced. I had all the mainline upgrades for capturing ships (the privateer and negotiations sections) for my perks, but I could still barely get to 10-15% success rate for capturing ships that were similar sized as I was. If they were smaller, I could get 50% or higher, and they would still fail most of the time. It made capturing ships a boring, repetitive process that just really wasn't worth it. Most ships have biometric shielding anyway, which prevents transport, so it makes the whole operation moot. While boarding was a nice concept, it just wasn't implemented in a great way. I haven't tried the freeroam or conquest modes yet, but I figure it would be the same as the campaign, just more "Choose Your Own Adventure". The empire management portion of the game is okay. It's simple enough to learn and grasp, and requires minimal micromanagement once it gets going. There's no real alert to when you're getting attacked (at least not in the campaign that I have found), so you just kind of have to monitor your sectors and make sure that you're not getting attacked by any enemies. Also how the devs chose to divide up the map was a little odd. Some places have several hexes of territory while others were only 2 hexes in size. There was no uniformity, some just had an outpost and a satellite link. Some were resource rich, others were mostly empty. There was no standardization of what you might find in a section you could conquer. No planetary invasion (other than using the big ship) was kind of a letdown, but I guess since you're always in a ship in space, it's fine. Everything else is finding a station or an output, fighting its garrison, and once it's destroyed, it's yours. Simple, but repetitive and can get a little old after a while. In the campaign there's little room for diplomacy, so I don't know much about how that works. If you click on a station or a planet owned by a different faction, you can speak with their ambassador and it gives you limited options on what you can do: declare war, do a trade agreement, or do them a favor. Couldn't see diplomatic annexation, or vassalage, or complex diplomatic options, just basic options you can do. I was also a little underwhelmed with the UI. The game gives a very bare-bones visual to start and you can turn on a "tactical view", which does help a bit, but the standard view is obstructive, so you have to zoom out so you can see the full tactical view. This removes a lot of the audio cues that you tend to get from being in closer, for no real reason, but I guess if you're looking for a quieter combat experience, this can be good. This definitely feels like it was made for a controller since the keys for keyboard and mouse are little awkward and all over the place. When you click the "Select Closest Target", the game oftentimes does NOT select the closest target and does not rotate through any options (including ones that may have moved closer) if you keep pressing the button. I'm not sure what logic they used to determine which target was "closest", but it is flawed to say the least. The combat itself is decent. You pick a ship, pick from 3 light weapon types (lasers, plasma cannons, and railguns) and 3 heavy weapon types (missiles and two other types that are not coming to me right now) that fit into slots on the ship. Larger ships can have fighters that can engage in combat as well. There is no point defense system, so nothing really stops fighters or missiles from striking your ship. There is one consumable item that allows you to prevent incoming missiles/projectiles from hitting, but it has a long cooldown and heavy weapons have a pretty short cooldown before they can be fired again, which makes the item kind of silly to use, and maybe as a last-resort if you need to get away. It feels like it's not meant to be used in combat to assist in defense. A lot of the other consumable items also feel underwhelming and meant as a last-resort to keep you alive as you flee, not as a durable way to stay in the fight. Most of the items have little to no effect on larger ships, or at least it does not appear to show any. The combat seems to be more fun when it's a bunch of smaller ships against another gaggle of smaller ships. Once you bring the bigger ships to bear, it becomes more of a slog fest than a fun engagement. Ship customization is a joke. You basically get to choose your loadout from a limited selection of weapon types, choose some enhancements, and you can add decals to the hull. Most of the hulls are so oddly shaped that the decals deform or duplicate. You can't change ship colors, can't change to have your faction have specific ship colors, and you can't even choose what types of ships your faction uses. They're just there and what you get is what you get. A large fun point for these space-style simulation games IS customizing your ship. The devs definitely dropped the ball on this. I did have fun playing the game, until I got to the "Titans Return" portion of the campaign anyway. While it does have a lot of flaws that keep it from being great, it's still a fun game for those who may sweat at the prospect of playing a more complex space simulation like the X series. There's hours of fun to be had exploring the Gemini sector, getting into engagements, slowly conquering the sector piece by piece. It will be a grind, and without the more advanced portions of the empire management, it may feel a little hollow for some. Get it on sale.

Unless you intend to play this on gamepad with nothing else plugged into your computer, don't bother. Devs have apparently decided for us that we arent allowed to do it any other way. Could have easily enough included a line in the local config files that disabled controller, nevermind going the REALLY complicated route of prompting the user to select gamepad or m & k. For the sake of clarity, this isnt a case of "I dont like playing with gamepad so I won't". After hitting play from steam, game launcher opens, and the first frame presented is the ONLY one that allows mouse and keyboard input. clicking into menus like mods, options, etc, literally anything else, brings up the gamepad controls, and disallows clicking via mouse, or any key navigation. I suppose if all youre doing is playing on a laptop and the only thing plugged in is the gamepad, this is probably not so bad, but for the other 100% of players who play pc because the like to play on pc, no joy. I would love to rate the game on it's actual content, but I won't know how it plays without watching someone ELSE play it, or disassembling my computer everytime I want to play this one game.

Bon ... que dire de SGW ... J'avais commencé le jeu, et abandonné une première fois, puis, après qu'on m'ai demandé mon avis dessus en privé, me voilà donc à le recommencer une deuxième fois afin de poster ma recommandation. Alors la page du magasin donne assez envie de jouer au jeu, il n'est pas moche du tout, il y a du "4X", pas mal de vaisseaux différents ... Oui, mais, car c'est une fois dans le jeu que les "mais" vont commencer à pleuvoir. Mais les contrôles ne sont aucunement intuitif, je me rappelle en plein tutorial, une main sur le clavier en zqsd, l'autre sur la souris, d'un seul coup le tuto me dit, maintenant appui sur 'divide' alors que je suis en plein combat spatial. J'ai cru que mon cerveau c'était fait la malle sur le coup. Il m'a fallut un instant pour comprendre "/", qui évidemment n'était PAS DU TOUT à coté. Et tout est comme ça, au début on vous dit, ah c'est cool tu sais, tu peux arraisonner des vaisseaux pour les démanteler et gagner des sous, ou des technologies, ou même directement voler le vaisseau pour ton usage perso ! Tu te dis woaaa ... trop classe ! Donc une fois que t'as eut ta phase tuto, tu essaies. Et ... comment dire ... devoir utiliser la souris, pour cliquer en bas à droite dans un petit rond, EN PLEIN COMBAT, pendant que t'essaie d'éviter tout ce qui te canarde et que tu dois passer trois plombes à voir l'abordage ce faire ... bah c'est pas simple. Surtout qu'au début, des abordages t'en réussit pas des masses, déjà parce que t'as pas beaucoup de troupes à envoyer depuis ton vaisseau, ensuite parce que t'as pas les technologies pour. Et quand t'obtiens enfin les deux, bah même ainsi ça foire et pourquoi ? Parce que t'as pas les bonus de piraterie qui se débloquent au fur et à mesure que tu voles des vaisseaux. Donc tu te retrouves dans des batailles gigantesques à dégommer tout les mega vaisseaux en serrant les fesses pour pas péter tout les petits vaisseaux que tu devras aborder juste ensuite, afin de débloquer les fameux bonus à la con pour plus tard voler les gros vaisseaux ... Et tout ça pour quoi ? 99% du temps, des vaisseau de merde que tu utiliseras jamais, donc bon, tu les envoies à ton QG pour que leurs technos soient recherchés. Mouais. Puis tu te rends compte plus tard, quand tu commences à te démerder, que tout les vaisseaux que t'as envoyé peuvent être déverrouiller en version MK2. Faut juste tous les recapturer une fois de plus chacun. Et est-ce que franchement à sert à quelque chose ? Non, parce que les vaisseaux MK2 du QG que tu débloques avec les recherches sont déjà largement assez sympa. Parlons ensuite des fameux vaisseaux que tu peux piloter, en gros tu montes de plus en plus jusqu'à finir par débloquer la classe ultime, un méga ultra super balèze vaisseau. Tu l'achètes, tu le prends, tu te dis que là le machin, c'est limite une station spatiale avec des réacteurs, grosso-modo, avec un bidule pareil, t'as plus jamais de soucis, t'as de l'espace en soute incroyable, tu dois avoir des milliers d'armes et de flottes de chasseurs, le rêve quoi. Puis tu le test. Et voilà la douche froide. Un machin ultra lent, avec pas des masses d'armes, très peu de soutes à chasseur. Le seul truc utile c'est qu'il recycle automatiquement toutes les épaves de vaisseaux autour. Donc bon ... Mouais ... Tu le prend par dépit car c'est un peu utile à la progression de ta partie. Mais franchement ça casse les couilles. Et tout ça, pour l'avoir, faut que tu montes de level, que tu fasses des missions, que tu gagnes de l'argent, que tu t'occupes de ton QG ... Ouep ... sauf si t'es comme moi le genre d'adepte qui sécurise ses positions énormément et fait tout ce qu'il y a à faire AVANT de continuer le jeu. Donc grosso modo, peu de temps après le tuto, on te remet les clef du QG et démerdes toi, va chercher machin, fait venir bidule, va acheter la chose ... Ok mais les gars, vous vous êtes rendu compte qu'on se fait attaquer par des pirates là ? Juste pour savoir, hein, à titre de référence pour plus tard. Non parce que moi, si je dois sécuriser le QG, je vais pas aller faire vos missions à la con à perpette, je vais le SECURISER ce putain de QG de merde. Donc je vais dans les secteurs rouges, j'en chie, je dégage les pirates du premier secteur, et hop, plus personne qui m'emmerde par là, puis je passe au deuxième, troisième, quatrième ... etc. Je gagne des sous, je gagne des level, je me retrouve tout en bas de la map et je peux pas prendre le dernier secteur rouge puisque c'est une planète pirate. Bon, pas de problème, je remonte. Je retourne à mon QG, bon, j'ai tout débloqué, j'ai quasi finit toutes les recherches, ah tient, je peux enfin acheter le vaisseau ultime, je le test ... MOUAIIIIIIISSSSSS ... Bon, reprenons la quête principale. Je vous passe les détails, je roule dessus, en gros, je me fais chier et je me dit rien à foutre, je vais explorer. Et ... je commence à le faire, à bord du paquebot le plus énorme et le plus lent de la galaxie. Je gagne plein de ressources, je vend plein de trucs, je dégomme plein d'ennemis ... et je m'emmerrrrrrrrrdeeeeeeeeeee. Là je me dit au fait, il parait que je peux créer des vaisseaux, faire des escadres, les faire patrouiller, prendre des secteurs ... plutôt que de le faire moi-même, je vais regarder ce que ça donne. Je fais créer les vaisseau, je forme une escadre ... ah, non, j'essaie de former une putain d'escadre de merde. Bon, voilà ! Cinq escadres d'un seul appareil ! Allez zou ! Sur l'objectif ! Ils y vont, ils en chient, le combat stagne, j'enclenche l'hyperdrive, je déglingue tout, je récupère automatiquement tout les cadavres avec mon titan des étoiles. Bon, bah ça à même pas rembourser le coup de mes appareils. Je veux même pas savoir combien de vaisseau seront nécessaire pour dégommer un point chaud et de la dépense en matières premières. Donc voilà, je serai peut-être l'un des seuls à ne pas recommander ce jeux. Mais clairement, dans l'état actuel, c'est sympa, mais c'est une purge.

This game has lots of potential but it is severely hamstrung by a rudimentary combat AI that pretty much either only sits there (large ships) or only tries to get on your tail (small ships). The result is that both you and the AI mostly only fly in circles. "Dog-fighting" is pointless because the AI weapons NEVER MISS from what i see. Light weapons, whether fired by the enemy or fired by your own crew with "fire at will" toggled on, always seem to converge on the target regardless of maneuvering, and heavy weapons track unerringly unless you use a decoy or a jump to sub-light to evade them. This makes combat both formulaic and boring. NONE of the light ships are properly configured for this kind of combat. Nearly ALL of their weaponry is mounted on the "top" of their hulls like a ground-pounding tank extracted from a world war 2 simulator where combat pretty much only takes place on a 2-D plane. That is not appropriate for an inherently 3-D combat environment. If maneuvering imparted ANY chance of dodging weapons fire then a forward configuration on light ships makes sense, but ONLY for those ships intended to launch fast attack runs on larger targets where you dodge enemy fire, dump a load of ordinance, and then burn-the-hello-out of there to set up for another attack run. That is not what is happening here. Going fast in combat provides no material benefit whatsoever and only serves to complicate the task of keeping your top mounted weapons facing the target. Just go slow and keep your top-front towards the enemy and that's pretty much it. Next, the writing and story-telling of the various missions are just about the MOST predictable writing i have ever seen in a space game. Every mission i have run i called out what was going to happen and so far i have yet to be wrong once. THEN there is this one main story mission where you get tractor-locked by a battleship and its escorts and you have to survive about 60 seconds before rescue. I watched my corvette's Hull-points vaporize in less than twelve seconds, but instead of exploding my ship was repeatedly given free auto-heals. It literally could not die. That is some SERIOUSLY lame story telling. If the writers are going to railroad me like that they could AT LEAST do me the courtesy of giving it to me in a cut-scene. The Territory control aspect of the game is an interesting thing to pair with the simulator part, but on its own it stands fairly below average for a 4X strategy game. I do like how controlling your "empire" doesn't take a great deal of effort so it doesn't detract from the flight portions at all. All-in-all, while this game has lots of potential and they blended the sim with the 4X well enough, it's not a good space sim or a good 4X strategy. Like "Spore", Starpoint Gemini Warlords tries to be too many things at once and it spreads itself too thin to actually excel at anything. The only thing that impresses me is that the game manages to not suck despite spreading itself too far to actually be good. If you are looking for reasonably challenging or engaging space combat though then go find an old copy of "Freespace". If you are looking for good story telling and great dialogue then find an old copy of "Tachyon: The Fringe". Bruce Campbell really KILLS IT as Pilot Jake Logan. Try "Stellaris" for a fantastic 4X game.