Recent reviews by DisposableHero78

D°°M

Disclaimer:
While a veteran gamer from the C64 times, i have never played the original "Star Control" games, so i can't compare this one to its predecessors nor make statements about how true it is to the franchise. Fans of the older games might have different views depending on their expectations from the older games. That said, i approached SC:O pretty much unbiased and with no real idea of what to expect.

Presentation:
While showing modern high res comic graphics, it is clearly based in old 16bit pixel-art style. The game relishes simplified grafics, but everything is very coherent. I guess it is a matter of taste if you like that or not. Within its artstyle, everything looks sound and feels just right.

The sound is a combination of catchy arcade tunes, moody/eerie space ambient and fast paced, dramatic battle tunes. The catchy ones remind me a bit of 16bit shooters like R-Type, Battle Squadron, Project X etc., some of the moodier ones while planetside have that Mass Effect vibe all over them. The overall sound realy remind of old "tracker" tunes from the AMIGA times.

Fitting the comic grafics, the dialogues with the alien NPCs are clearly not taking themselves too seriously. There is a ton of hillarious jokes, puns, irony/sarcasm and references to other sci-fi franchises and general pop-culture. Again a matter of taste, but i totaly dig that kind of shenanigans.

Stability & Performance:
I have seen quite a few comments about the game that complain about bad stability. I can NOT confirm this. In the 90+ hours i played the game, i didn't have a single crash. I always have Discord and FireFox with multiple tabs open running in the background, ALT-TAB back and forth regularly and even leave my computer running overnight with the game paused in the Save/Load menue with absolutly no hassle when comming back the next day to play on.

I could be benefiting from a powerfull PC. I run a 6700K @ 4.5GHz, 32 GB of DDR4 3200MHz RAM and a 1080Ti with 11GB of VRAM. Machines with less RAM or VRAM might suffer from this, as i have seen SC:O gobble up vicious ammounts of both. After ~30 Minutes of playing, Afterburner shows SC:O using 10GB of VRAM and 20GB+ of system RAM. For the grafics the game has, this is rediculous - even AAA titles with state of the art 3D-graphics don't do that. This might be connected to the games performance:

While everything is fine in the menues, dialogue screens, in solar systrems, traveling hyperspace and in the arcade battles, the games weak 3D-engine shows while exploring planetside. Even on my PC and with only playing in 1920*1080, the framerate fluctuates a lot. On simple desert, forest or baren rock planets, FPS range from 120-150, which is smooth, but considering the grafics already very low. The engines poor performance shows when special effects and blending are involved. The sparkling ground effects, gasclouds, reflections and glittering on crystal worlds and lightning strikes bring even the toughest rig to its knees. Single effects are barely noticable, but when 3-4 of these play at the same time or dare to overlap, the FPS go down to 40-ish, accompanied by a noticable increase of inputlag, the whole game reacts slugish and delayed for a brief moment. I don't know which engine Star Dock uses here, but it seems to be a rather old one that has not aged very well.

Story:
The Story of SC:O might not be the most complex one, but it has several nice added layers of depth to it. The basic idea is that humanity is just on the brink of reliable interplanetary(!) travel, when events unravel the existance of a diverse alien society that inhabits space arround earth. That alien society is lead by a ruthless and powerfull race called the Scryve.

The problem is that those Scryve don't realy like young new species on the galactic stage and simply exterminate all of them for the sole reason of fearing one of them might one day rival and destroy them. The other members of that empire are ward species that are forced into obediance. But someone out there seems to like humanity, and so the game beginns.

Added to that main aspect are several more 2nd grade storylines that tie into the main plot, but i dont wanna spoil anything about these here. Besides these 2nd grade storylines that all seem to indicate that there MUST be DLCs and addons or more parts to SC:O, there is dozens of 3rd grade side missions in the different solar systems that add to the richness and livelyness of the game - and also help with an important thing: ressources! This leads to the last topic:

Gameplay:
The gameplay in SC:O consists of roughly 3 parts, that by design also overlap a bit into each other:

The adventure component, where you discover new species, talk to them, make friends or foes based on what you say or do, explore planets for ruins to find out new story elements, gadgets and ship components etc..
This also inlcudes dialogues with earth's Star Control headquarters, alliens on their ships or homeworld, precursor space stations or traders offering fuel and equipment throught the starmap. The plotlines of the main and side stories are also part of this adventure component.

The arcade fighting component, which happens when you encounter hostile alien ships in space. At the beginning of a fight, you pick your main ship or any of the alien ships in your fleet (should you have any). Then you are thrown into a circular arena representing the system you are in and have to fight a single or a number of alien ships. This happens in a classic "Asteroids" way .. you control your ship with WASD to rotate, accellerate and brake, mouse buttons fire primary and secondary weapons. There are a A LOT of different ship types and A LOT of different primary and secondary weapons that allow for diverse and challanging fights. In the arena itself there are several bonuses, dangers and other gimmicks.

Your chances of winning are of course determined by your skill, but also by the upgrades you applied to your ship, to your fleet and a "stone-paper-scissor" element of what ships you fight against. If one of your ships is destroyed, you get to pick the next one, if your last ship or your main ship is destroyed, it's game over. If you destroyed the last enemy ship, you win and will recieve some RU (the cash in SC:O) as a reward.

NOTE:
There is an upgrade called an AI fleet manager. DON'T even bother. It fights the arcade battles for you. In early fights it has a chance of ~50/50 of winnig fights for you, but at a very high cost of personel, it tends to make stupid things. In later battles against larger fleets or BOSS ships, it simply guarantees that you'll loose. It's AI is just terribly bad. It takes time to get used to the controls, but it is totaly worth it, and in the later fights you MUST apply special tactics that the AI just isn't capable of.

Ressource farming / the grind:
The third and (at least in the beginning) the most grindy gameplay element is farming ressources on planets. You send a lander vehicle down to a planets surface and collect ressources. This is made challanging by environmental hazard, enemies or the surface itself. Your lander can be upgraded to land safer, endure evironmental hazards or enemy attacks better or to carry more personal or ressources. While many consider this a dull grind, it IS part of the gameplay and can be fun. The farming "dullness" is also broken up by agressive alien probes roaming alot of the planets and by discovering crashed ships, buildings or ruins. And farming gets less important in the later game, as fighting bigger alien fleets will reward you with multiple times the cash even the richest planets can offer in ressources.

Look up the fist line