Star Control: Origins

« Star Control: Origins successfully grasps the perfect balance of serious and silly while making an engaging universe that’s fun to explore. The voice acting is wonderful, the script is brilliant, and the fleet battles are short, sweet, and exciting. With an in-depth crafting system, a living universe, and a multitude of choices that subtly affect the story, Star Control: Origins soars. »

« If you enjoy space games, exploring the unknown, establishing communications with potential allies and enemies, as well as shooting stuff out of space, you'll enjoy Star Control: Origins. »

« As a person who loved Star Control II, Star Control: Origins has been much fun and reminded me of things I missed about the old game while giving me new amazing and sometimes hilarious moments in the new game. »

« It’s nearly unheard of for a company to pick up the rights to a game franchise and actually do the damn thing justice, but here we are with Star Control: Origins. The adventure is fun, funny, and all together engaging. I’m probably as surprised as you are that the game is actually this good. »

« Star Control: Origins perfectly combines exceptional writing, total exploration freedom, satisfying space combat, excellent voice acting and hypnotizing music. Although I felt intimidated by the importance of the journey ahead, the well written, humorous dialogues gently transitioned me into a state of pure excitement. No words can better describe Star Control: Origins than actually playing it. It's a masterpiece. »

« Star Control: Origins was an absolute joy for me. Its story and characters were utterly charming and unique. Its combat is a ton of fun. »

« Remaining true to its roots with engaging ship to ship combat but shifting the gameplay to a more narrative focused exploration game, Star Control: Origins excels at it's prime directive. As we push out from that core loop there are elements that can drag on, but the central experience is where it stands tallest, incorporating a playful tale with entertaining delivery around excellent two dimensional, top down ship to ship combat. »

« Origins is a surprisingly good successor to the famous trilogy. There’s a big galaxy to explore, choices to make and memorable characters to meet. Dialogues are great, and arcade parts are simple, yet fun. Together, they make a game that will easily keep your interest for a week at least. [Issue#234, p.54] »

« The gameplay is a repetitive grind. Combat gets repetitive quickly. Exploring planets is boring. Even the art style feels like this would have been an iPhone free-to-play game, except for the story. They try to rehash a lot of SC2 and even copy the first few hours of story. A lot of the writing is awkward. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but the original games had a certain magic. This feels like your dad wanted to show you how to REALLY dance. Just cringe. Refund. »

« I enjoyed it, and had zero bugs unlike a lot of the other posters. Good writing is marred by the absolute trash that is the lander 'gameplay' portions, of which there are far, far too many. I probably would have given this a 6 or 7 instead of 8 if I hadn't cheated a little by looking up the stargate locations ahead of time. Spending forever running around the overhead map would have been admittedly INCREDIBLY tedious. »

« Picked it up in the sale and i really love it. It resembles SCII maybe a bit too much, but as fans of the original i can imagine why they went for that. The planets are a bit of a chore eventually, but the music makes up for that. Love the races, love the gameloop. In the beginning the game doesn't run that well, but give it time and eventually the shaders are fully loaded. Recommended! »

« I was a huge fan of the original games, and Origins definitely reminds me of those games. Disappointing that **** and the original devs couldn't work together for a proper Star Control game. Ship combat needed a bit of work. But the personality and feel of the game is there. Overall I was pretty happy with it. »

« I never played any previous Star Controls and picked up the game thanks to the Ars Technica extened interview with the creators. What I liked: - the music - resource gathering - most of the story - the animated and voiced hail screens - many of the UI conveniences What I disliked: - combat, especially space combat with that vectoring-thrust mechanic - massive framerate drops due to particle effects on planets - no easy way to see what new tech unlocked - the star system/hyperspace drifting - some form of list or indicator showing all planets in the system - the "realistic" lighting of planets that made many of them just blend into the background - no indication what planets I cleared - point of interest markers not removed - the Kzanti that hail you all the time and no option to just shoot them immediately or make them go away for good »

« I was also a founder for this game and have great love for the franchise. UQM was a high water mark to measure against, a very simple game with easy mechanics that would be a cinch to emulate today, made by a small crew on a tight budget. It was clever, witty, fun, and filled with fast, tight gameplay. It had heart, soul and heaps of imagination despite its meager roots. SCO has its moments. Story is alright, character animations are good, voice acting is fine. But it ultimately feels like an unfinished product halfway through development, and the most interesting aspects of UQM are the ones that were most neglected. Discovering different types of critters in UQM was one of the most fun aspects of exploring planets. There were a few dozen critter types and there were an interesting variety of them. In SCO, you can count the number of critter types on one hand, and the galaxy has been copy pasted with this small selection. Same set of creatures everywhere you go, and nothing breaks immersion and the suspension of disbelief like seeing the same creatures on EVERY SINGLE PLANET. It's like you're exploring the same planet over and over again for hours. Structures are so boring that a six year old could build something better in Minecraft. Consistency problems with voice acting. Casual encounters in space are sometimes just written text, while others have voices. There is no consistency in how these are handled, it's just a crap shoot as to whether or not aliens actually speak to you or if you have to read their text messages. UQM's melee was snappy, intense, and short lived because of the close quarters combat. SCO combat feels like a game of fly fishing because the arenas are enormous and do not behave the same way. You spend a lot of time positioning for attack and not much time attacking, or having your movement slowed or stopped by the environment. It is not bad combat, it's just not great. UQM combat gives the same rush today as thirty years ago, while this feels like it is still in testing even as a finished product. Lander gameplay is repetitive, a concern during development that remained unresolved upon release. They failed to address the tediousness. There were big plans to differentiate planets distinct geological features, bodies of water to jet across, etc. None of that was even attempted. I know because I watched the game evolve and can testify that what you see in the final release barely evolved from what they had early on in development. Lander mechanics are not suited to racing across terrain; it frequently gets lopsided as a result of poor game mechanics, not lack of player skill. Feels like the environment and vehicle were designed by different teams who never were asked to meet and make it fun to play. There are so many other games that they could have taken inspiration from. Could have added a jet pack to leap over obstacles and reduce the amount of time to travel a long distance. I guess that sounded like work so they went and had lunch instead. UQM had tight lander gameplay; you were always in pursuit or retreating. You could land and take off within a minute or two. You could choose to land near a specific area to reduce travel time. SCO feels like all the same ideas but in slow motion, with little going on during landings to make them interesting or beyond different planet surface textures. You cannot choose where to land, increasing travel times. So it's largely a resource grinder without much combat grinding, all while staring at boring scenery that never changes because they've rubber stamped the game with the same art, models and textures a thousand times. The crime here is that there was a ton of conceptual art produced by some talented artists at **** for many different types of creatures and environments during development. I was looking forward to just going to different planets and seeing all the visual splendor of each unique location. Absolutely none of it was developed, and I know because I read all the developer diaries and played the betas. The excuse is that they just “had to scrap” so many great ideas. Yeah, no, not buying it. There was documentation of development setbacks, creative direction changes, and multiple iterations on the same ideas. A lot of effort that amounted to nothing. This game was not given appropriate time and resources. And to insult the intelligence of players with excuses about scrapping development ideas is the height of hubris when there are many examples of action exploration games from small studios that have pulled this off. I decided to give it some credit for at least being playable. The kicker is that the director of **** spends a lot of time in online communities and message boards defending himself, which he can do until he's blue in the face. At the end of the day, this is still an unpolished and unmemorable product that plays like a giant beta test, and it's really a damn shame. »

« "A lack of navigational tools, dull resource collecting, and oversimplified space battles all conspire to knock the game down a peg. Star Control: Origins serves up a lively galaxy worth exploring, but sometimes the commute can be a killer." It's a quote and it sums up the whole game. »

« As a fan of Star Control. Minus: 1) Most old aliens are gone. Plus: 2) Now, it is easy to track the conversation. Star Control has lots of conversation and you must pay attention to it, so if you miss something important, then you are screwed. Now. it has a log. And there is more, if you click on the log, then it points you to where you must go, so if you miss something important then you could read it later. 3) The new graphics. 4) It is not a remake but a new version. The story is surprisingly better than the old games. - It's epic. - It has lore. However, the old lore is gone. - It has twists. 5) The landers minigame is better., way better. In the previous games, the lander minigame was frustrating at best. 6) Some comments say that the galaxy is boring. How is it boring?. This game is about aliens and exploration, and the galaxy is filled with surprises: - new aliens, some are part of the story and others have their own side-story. - minerals, ok, this adds a bit of frustration, Francium mainly. - you can find some ships, weapons, building, some aliens that think that you are a deity and so much more. - There are several kinds of planets and more. I think there are about 8-10 times x diversity x size x harshness, so the combinations of different planets are huge. 7) The music is cool too. Some tunes remind me of Captain Future. 8) The game is hard. 9) The aliens have a backstory and they have their own reason, they are not just unidimensional characters. 10) It has comedy. Star Control (including this version), isn't a perfect game. However, this version is the best one. »