Developer: Little Green Men Games
Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
Platform: PC, Xbox One
Tested on: Xbox One
Starpoint Gemini 2 – Review
‘Space, the final frontier..’. These were the iconic first words of the Star Trek series that conquered the hearts of many, and still do, even today. Star Trek, Star Wars and other franchises such as Alien, made mankind ponder even more about what’s beyond our solar system and whether we are truly alone in the vastness of the universe. Starpoint Gemini 2 offers you the chance to explore the giant black pool known as space from the comfort of your sofa, with this Xbox One port. As we missed the chance to review the original PC version in 2014, we decided to boldly go where no man has gone before and make a name for ourselves in outer space. We simply weren’t quite sure if we would be the righteous space crusader or the savvy plundering space pirate.
Story
As the free roam mode is actually considered to be the first choice by the game, rather than the actual campaign, the story itself proves to be rather ‘simple’, as this game is pretty much all about gameplay. Nonetheless, the story present helps you to learn the ropes, without having to dive into all the tutorials first.
You take command over your very own spaceship under the guise of Adrian Faulkner, who is the offspring of the legendary Gabriel Faulkner, who played a big role in the Gemini war. Even though you followed your father’s footsteps, he seemingly did his best to keep you away from danger during his last, secret, mission. When hailed by an emergency frequency you decide to respond, but it seems you arrive too late, as your father’s vessel has been destroyed, along with him. While grievous at first, you decide to get back in the intergalactic saddle and follow your father’s last request to finish his mission and keep the galaxy safe from otherworldly invaders, all while being the first Nancy Drew in space to solve the mystery of your dad’s death.
The story itself is presented by voiced cutscenes with ingame graphics or simple text windows after retrieving extra information. Perhaps a few cockpit views etc would have been nice, but other than that the visualization of the story works just fine for a game like this.
Graphics
A beautiful backdrop might be the most astonishing feature of the game, as the rest just gets sucked in a black hole in comparison. The backgrounds look like an actual view of space, with a clear distinction of different systems in that same background, as well as stars, nearby planets and other moving objects that scurry along the void and otherwise emptiness of space. Nonetheless, the game does offer a reasonable amount of different vessels and space stations, which all look fairly decently done, while some might pop out in comparison to other. The clutter however, and some of the roaming stations and satellites look rather pale compared to the things we just mentioned. All in all, this space adventure looks great and it might not fully live up to the expectations of a next-gen console, but it certainly approaches the quality of many other games.
The UI has been kept quite simple, making sure a minimum of clutter is on your screen at all times. This means that many of the functions of your vessel and/or other interactive options are hidden in the different menus of the game. These menus look fairly modest but they provide a nice frame for the entire space adventure. Only at one given time things get a bit crowded, namely when hostiles are in your vicinity. When there are enemy vessels near your ship, you’ll see a circular frame appear around your spaceship, which shows the strength of your different shields.
Seeing you’re flying on a massive map, you’ll encounter a tad too many frame rate drops. While these often occur when entering a new zone, or when a certain amount of action is going to take place, they do get rather tedious. It kind of hampers the overall smoothness of the space backdrop when your console seemingly has issues loading new zones or preparing for battle.
Given that pretty much everything is a good looking whole, the mood does get hampered a bit not only by the frame rate drops, but also by the fact that you can fly through many stations and other objects as if they aren’t there.
Sound
Given the vast emptiness of space, one would expect a tranquil soundtrack to accompany you on your voyage, nonetheless, there’s quite an adventurous soundtrack in the game that might even lift up the spirits of the game. On many occasions you’ll find yourself pumped thanks to the great soundtrack, which certainly helps you traverse through the galaxy. All is accompanied by qualitative voice acting, albeit mostly in the campaign mode instead of the free roam mode.
Of course, a space adventure also has a lot of silent moments, as there is no sound in outer space. That being said, explosions and weapon fire and other typical SFX can still be heard, making sure you won’t drop dead from the soundless oasis called space.
Gameplay
Starpoint Gemini 2 is mainly a space simulation game, where it’s all about exploring, trading, some combat on the side and building up your own personal space admiral career (4X), by striving to get the best vessel possible. Nonetheless, you’ll start the game with only a small ship at your disposal and after that you’re pretty much on your own.
Early on in the game, you’ll notice that you’re pretty much dropped in the middle of outer space without any proper explanation of what to do and how to do it. From here on out, be it in free roam or the campaign mode, you’ll either follow missions you’ll uncover, or you can simply explore, destroy, collect and so on. Of course the game offers you a sense of a tutorial, where you can open a tutorial menu when prompted, but the menu takes way too long to open, as it’s the internet manual of the game. Nonetheless, the game is pretty much a big oasis of trial and error, and you might even find yourself starting a new game after you’ve squandered your money in on some useless items.
Even though in the campaign it’s more or less a given that you try to follow in your father’s footsteps, the game does offer you many opportunities to do as you like. While at the beginning it’s not that advised to be a douchebag of galactic proportions, you can become a pirate and other nasty things as you progress or you can simply uphold all your righteous principles and become the next guardian of the galaxy.
Even though the game is mainly simulation, with some action intertwined, you will also get experience for the many things you’ll do throughout your voyage. With this experience you’ll level up and you’ll be able to unlock skills and perks, which will help you choose your path in space. Money is the second big important factor of the game, as you’ll need more money in order to upgrade your vessel, buy new ones, buy extra fighters, new weaponry, shields and so on. We can immediately tell all space fanatics that the game does have a lot of different components to offer and a decent amount of customization.
The controls work rather responsive, even though it will take some time getting used to working with the different menus the game has. In many of these menus you’ll notice crucial functions such as repair, board, auto-fire, etc, which will all be used a lot during your play sessions. Nonetheless, again the problem of having hardly any tutorial in the game itself, makes it sometimes rather hard to know what the game expects of you precisely. After a while things gets more clear, but it’s, just as stated before, trial and error. We were quite happy to see that the developers implemented some control options, as the original settings with inverted camera etc were quite tedious in order to aim precisely during combat.
While it would be rather fun to make this review into more of a guide, as the game offers a lot of extra functions and fun items to explore, to trade (which can be done by anchoring at planets or stations), and so on, we’ll keep it quite modest when we say that the game has enough content to last you for many hours to come. Not only the overall content will be time consuming, but traveling from one location to another will also take a lot of time from your hands, although for some reason this game works quite relaxing, as you’re truly a small speck in the giant galaxy this game portrays.
Conclusion
Starpoint Gemini 2 is a great space simulation game with many different functions, options and overall things to do. While it has a massive amount of content, it’s fair to say that the slow pace might not be suited for those who wish to wage war all the time. With some graphical issues the game will never hit the top shelf of the gaming charts, but as a simulation game it’s a quite solid experience. If you’re into sim games and you need a lot of space when playing them, this one might be your cup of galactic tea.
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