This is a faithful recreation of the boardgame. If you, like me, have been trapped at home and itching for some Terraforming Mars this will give you the experience. I especially like solo mode, which plays much better than it did in the table top version. All in all, it provides an excellent and far faster way to play the game. The little animation flourishes for the special tiles are a great bonus.

It's not all smiles and chocolate however-- I think this version has way to many time consuming action verifications and it really hurts for a some sort of undo button. Perhaps I just played at a forgiving table, but either a card play preview for something like the mining tiles or a single step undo button would be very nice and would totally be something we allowed at the table.

Star Control: Origins is a spiritual sequel to Star Control 2: The Ur-Quan Masters. As such, it takes the basic gameplay cycles present in SC 2 and polishes them. It presents an enjoyable reimagining of the original Star Control 2 story. The cartoonish alien species which populate the volume of local space all have entertaining and enjoyable personalities. The villians are suitably evil and understandable in a Thanos kind of way.

If you are in this game for the nostalgia factor, you will enjoy it. However, the steps it took away from the basic SC2 formula were a mixed bag. The wide variety of alien ships present in the galaxy give this universe a much needed lived in feeling. However, the lack of coherent theme in species tactical combat generally reduces enjoyability of encounters. While I had a wide stable of ships at my disposal by the mid game, I found I only used my flagship once I got the first missle upgrade. I gave new ships a try once or twice and then seemed to cease using them. I believe this is because they all have essentially one of three different weapon systems, a mediocre secondary weapon or a defensive system, and low crew counts. I found two ships over the course of the game that had crew counts near the scale of the flagship and they were hampered by a lack of ability to repair them. Gone are the wildly varying ship abilities from SC2, such as the Pkunk curse based energy recharge system and serial immortality, the Syreen's crew theft system, or the Druudge's self damage based recharge. Also gone, for some puzzling reason, is the ability to retreat from combat. Origins seems to lack the boldness to master it's own combat cycle.

For all of that, the tactical combat is actually quite fun. The arenas are far more interesting than SC2. They are filled with powerups and wormholes. The border has a tendency to shrink over time, in the Battle Royale style. If the game was limited to the main combat ships of each species, I believe fleet combat would be much improved. It is simply muddied by the lack of clear strategic decision making. My flagship was the most versitile ship in my armada, so it got used for everything.

The story is excellent. It is strange and fun and I want to spend more time exploring this universe and it's quirky characters.

Planetary exploration is fun, but you have to have enjoyed the system in Mass Effect 1 as it is clearly based off of the Mako. I enjoyed the it, but it did get a bit repetitive as the game progressed. I wish there were fewer crashed alien ships waiting to be added to my fleet. They were, with the exception of a single Scryve Battlecruiser that seemed like a special event, garbage. An ability to turn them into cash would greatly help the early game resource grind. I greatly enjoyed the other planet based events.

The ship upgrade system was fun. I enjoyed the transition from hunk of junk to unstopable battlecruiser over the course of the game. This is the place where the modular visual ship designs would have greatly helped. It seems a strange oversight. I desparately wish there was a "refuel and leave" button in the starbase menu. The button to buy fuel is buried three button clicks deep in the menu when it is the only mission critical item in the whole system. Why not put it and lander purchase in the sidebar?

The voice acting and sound design are great. The music is simply fabulous. It has a chip tunes feel and works wonders.

As of this writing, there are still a lot of bugs minor issues. The 'Sell all Conventional' button doesn't light up, but only occasionally (probably due to a flag being thrown after one sell all that doesn't get turned off when I return with a fresh haul). The main background in Star Control HQ didn't show up sometimes. After I beat the final encounter, SC HQ wouldn't let me leave with a particular piece of equipment on my ship and seemed convinced I still had to go fight the final battle, but only after returning from the Starbase menu. The crew increasing powerup didn't seem to work on my flagship once I started adding crew modules to my flagship. There is a puzzling inability to drop items from your inventory, so no dumping that worthless Oxygen if you find some amazing Tzo Crystals. The loading times seemed random and the loading screen could have done with some variety.

Overall, I would recommend Star Control: Origins to anyone who is a fan of Star Control 2. I would also recommend it to anyone who likes RPGs and isn't afraid of a bit of a grind.

Praise Jeff!

Good idea that is, unfortunatly, far more linear than it might appear. The titular Bad Guy's sight radius seems a bit wonky, figuring out the secondary objectives is more a matter of wrestling the controls than of cleverness, and, while the sound track starts off excellent, by the third repetition it all becomes massively annoying.