Star Control: Origins Review

Humanities fate is in your hands

Star Control is back with a new addition to the series, Star Control: Origins. In SC:O  you are the Captian of Earths only interstellar ship. Primarily tasked with finding out about the Lexites until the threat of alien annihilation rears its head in our solar system. It is up to you to explore the stars and find a way to stop this encroaching threat upon humanity. Are you ready to explore the stars? This is our Star Control: Origins review.

In Star Control: Origins you have the options to make friends with many aliens or cause trouble between you and them. There are some aliens you will have no choice but to have a conflict with. In the main Adventure Mode, you will use these connections to find out more about the Scryve and stop them from wiping out all humanity. To do so you will mine resources and upgrade your ship and lander to better combat the threat. Also recruiting new ships into your fleet is also another helpful thing you will be doing. There are so many funny aliens in the game. One of the very first you meet are the Tywom and they want to hug all humans.  Each aliens ship and race is pretty unique. It has been so much fun discovering them.




Customization:

Speaking of ships, in SC:O there is a ship designer. You can customize and build your own ship from many different pieces for Fleet Battles or your own crafted universe. The possibility to make some very unique, one of a kind ships is there. It is possible to outfit these ships with weapons and all sorts of other goodies to make them either super tough or faulty. When done with designing those ships you can upload them to Steamworks for others to download as well as download other player made ships. A thing that did bug me about ship designer was that I could not figure out how to rotate the camera around my ship or if that is even possible. I think it would just be nice to get a full 360 view on the ship so I can make sure pieces are placed correctly in the right spot. It does have this option, but I couldn’t quite figure it out.

Star Control: Origins comes with a slew of creative modes to make your crafted universe really something special.  Not only is there a ship designer, but you can also design your own buildings unique to your own custom-made alien races for your universe. Yep, you heard me right custom alien races, along with dialogue and being able to craft your own quests.  I can not wait to see the different type of aliens the community will make and new adventures I’ll be able to go on. Of course, along with this, you can edit planets as well. What would custom aliens be without their own custom world? Universe designing and world designing were not in the build I played so I’m not able to tell you about those in detail. If they are anything like the ship designer and building designer we can expect some good customization from those.

It is important to note that this is not a continuation or prequel to the previous games. This is a reboot of the Star Control series. If you have played the original trilogy you will find fun in this just like with the original. At least I have and I’ve played one out of the trilogy. Other races from the original trilogy will make their appearance. I have not run into any yet as this game can be pretty massive with exploring and side quests.

Ship Combat:

The ship combat has been pretty interesting. Now as I’ve been exploring a lot I have not come across a lot of new weapons besides the ones I got for doing the trial missions on Ceres. In combat, the ships move at a fast pace. The fast pace and different weapons of the many different ships you come into contact with are what add the difficulty to battle. At the moment I can guess it is because I don’t have significant upgrades to my ship, but in the beginning, your ship is a bit hard to control. I slide into so many asteroids while trying to turn during combat. Combat so far has been pretty fun, I have smacked down all of 3 aliens and looking forward to more combat with better upgrades.

When looking at the map I can see there are many places to go to. Lots of exploration to be had. 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.

Summary
I recommend giving this game a try if you love space exploration and some funny interactions with aliens. Being able to roam around on planets has been a new and interesting experience with all the different weather effects. Also to be noted and as you can see from some of the screenshots, this game has some beautiful artwork as well as great music. With so many different customization options this there is a lot of replayability. Again, if this all sounds like something up your alley give it a try let me know what you think down below. Happy space exploring Captains!
Good
  • Great Dialogue
  • Lots of Customization
  • Much to Explore
Bad
  • No camera rotation in Ship Designer
  • Ship movement in combat is hard to control
9
Amazing
Written by
I'm an animator, illustrator, gamer, and writer. Most notably I love anime, manga, life and learning about things I don't know. Can never stop learning.

1 Comment

  1. Reviews are all over the place for this one. Looks fun

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