Starpoint Gemini Reviews

I'd like to think people would come to my defense if someone said something untrue or false about me and after reading so many negative reviews and scores on this game, I wanted to, as a fan of the space sim genre and a gamer, come to the defense of this game but after 8 or so hours.......let me explain.... I really wanted to give this game a chance and I did try despite it's....flaws, however minor or major, which I will explain because I can't stand criticism without a reason. I was having fun, once I learnt the ropes, which buttons do what, how missions work, how I make money, a very basic frame that works. There are missions from various space stations, you can mine rocks to sell the ore to stations, buy commodities low and sell high. Upgrade your ship or buy a completely new and more powerfull ship with better upgrade slots, hire officers for your ship wich give you certain abilities and basically do whatever the heck you like in an open world sandbox space sim. The ideas themselves work, it's what you'd expect to find in this type of game. Right, so where did I find it went wrong? Generally the first thing a gamer notices is the graphics but that's only the most obvious thing and it doesn't make a game. With SPG it's in your face, very noticable that for a 2011/12 game, you'd expect a little more bells and whistles. I have to say the thing I found most grating was the voice acting, I'm not sure if they were genuine accents or acting but in all honesty I HAD to read the subtitles because I couldn't understand a thing the actors were saying, let alone differentiate one from another. The controll of the ship was jumpy, if you use the keyboard for turning there is a massive jump in direction, too sensitive. And if you use the mouse for control, particularly durning combat, it feels janky. Using the mouse you need to mouselook as well as turn to the direction of the enemy ship...very difficult. I found it a lot easier to use the mouse for looking and selecting during combat and the keyboard for turning. BUT, for some reason the worst thing I encountered amongst a list of others, was the fact that you have so many skills that you could easily use and are quite helpfull...but only one action bar with 5 slots........I tried to reason with myself: " I don't need to use 10 or more skills do I?" But simply put, if anyone at all found more than 5 skills usefull, they have every right to damn well use them and be able to equip them on the quickbar. In actual fact, I found myself using active pause so I could swap out the 10 other skills I wanted to use....to much frustration!!!! Games are supposed to be fun! And I did find this enjoyable but the negatives outweighed the posatives for me, the quickbar thing was for me the gamebreaker, the point where the enjoyment turned into the frustration. I did overlook the graphics, voice acting and overcame the quirkiness of the controll methods initially but if I can't use 6+ abilities on the fly or at will by clicking an icon on that hotbar then it's a game I'm unable to play at it's full potential. One last word. Unfortunately also, there is very little on the web about SPG, no lets play vids no walkthroughs and not much or nothing on tactics or hints on how to play. I was hoping to go through the story of the game before I played SPG 2, which incedentally has so much more info and hype around it that it's predecessor and for good reason. So at this stage, I can't recommend SPG.

Remember to save up a ton of money - or sell your ship - before you're called in to do a certain space station defense story mission. Otherwise, you'll end up destroying all the enemies just because you can -> Proceed to complete the mission -> then watch as your ship gets blown up because there were "too many enemies" and someone had to stay behind as bait for the evacuation. Huh? Didn't you blow them all up? On the very next mission, you end up in a weaponless shuttle with no afterburners and paper-thin shields. Your mission? Infiltrate a heavily guarded military compound deep in the heart of enemy territory. Wow, lo and behold, the alarm trips while you're right in the middle and you have to escape. Not...happening. In a fit a frustration, on the 5th restart or so, I broke story and used the money I had left to purchase a ship with weapons, loaded it with the best gizmos for its class (jump drive and afterburners not optional), and proceeded to barely survive that mission. This game has that and more plot holes. Mainly, whoever had designed the game continually assumes you're still piloting that dinky starting freighter instead of working your ass off to buy a class 10 dreadnought with the latest upgrades. That wasn't all that pissed me off, this game took a page from Freelancer and added radio chatter. However, if you listen closely to the radio chatter, it ends up being one of three things. Something about law enforcement are all pigs. Some guy being interdicted and scanned. And something else. Wow, I'm happy that I'm finally forgetting what they were saying. After listening to the inane chatter for the several hours that I played the game, you'd think it'd have sunk in more. Ah, but wait till you get into battle. Then you're treated to a hostile cacophony and some small schmuck in the background threatening to kill you. No, seriously. It's like you're in a noisy nightclub and there's some guy with the band singing an accompaniment of death threats at odd times. And don't even get me started on getting killed at the very beginning because my level 1 ship can't stand up to a level 20 pirate. Actually, I thought that was interesting. Never mind. Still, I think the game has far too many stupid issues to be recommendable.

Don't be turned off so quickly by all of the other bad reviews – I would say that some of these people are stuck on "beauty is skin deep." I can agree with the other reviewers in some aspects; if you have big standards for shiny polish on games, you might want to avoid this one. The graphics are dated, the controls take some getting used to (I keep having to look at the configuration to figure out what I pressed by accident, even after 15 hours). There are bugs and CTD's. You can’t dock with T-gates sometimes or steer. The camera gets stuck at odd angles on occasion and you have to change sectors to fix it. The music selection leaves a bit to be desired. The radio chatter is repeatable. One guy complained the tutorial was too long! I found it was just right for the complexity of the game and it got the basics down quite quickly. You just have to wait patiently for them to read all the text on the screen out (there is no “click to skip”). As for graphics, the sector backdrops are a bit washed out for my liking, I love the colorful and crisp sector graphics in X3. The music, though quite good, has a very limited number of tracks and is quite repeatable. HOWEVER, this game has engaged me happily for over 20 hours now, and I’m only halfway through the campaign with very little extra exploration. The campaign can be challenging at some times, but I found it was a bit too easy to make money and afford a dreadnaught. It seems you need to do this in order to make good progress in the campaign. At one stage in the campaign you lose your ship, however you keep all of your equipment and cash. No problem, at that time I had enough to buy three new dreadnaughts. So yes, the campaign is a bit out of balance sometimes. In the campaign, there is a lot of "fly to this sector, blow up this ship, then fly to that sector." But it's all wrapped up in a package that keeps it enjoyable, as you search for derelict ships to loot, Rogue containers to crack open and steal goodies from, and fight off pirates that randomly attack you. You can speed up monotonous travel by getting a T-Drive, but then you miss out a lot of the sightseeing opportunities along the way, and also chances to dock at stations to find better equipment than what you already have. If you are excited by the prospect of boarding and capturing ships, this game does it nicely! If you love to customize ship equipment (weapon slots, shield slots, engine slots), you'll enjoy this game. If you want to play with over 50 different ships, each having different special abilities, you'll enjoy this game. If you like RPG-style characters, where you can focus on specific weapon types (beam vs. plasma) and improve your skills as you level up, you'll enjoy this game. You can even hire different officers, each which will add to your perks or boost one or more of your ship stats. The game gives you the possibility to line up your stats and perks to make an ultra-powerful beam-equipped ship destroys everything easily, until you hit an enemy who has shields and equipment specifically set up to resist beam weapons. Then you’re screwed. What fun!!! The game has many aspects familiar to Freelancer - faction names and how they're handled, station names, station designs, radio chatter, jump gates. It also shares common control mechanisms with Eve Online, including 2D controls, ship configurations and character skill leveling. I wouldn't call it a "rip off" of any other game; rather it combines many of the great elements from other games, while setting up a solid new story and universe to enjoy them in. It's all tied together quite well in an engaging way, and I am continuously reminded of fond times I had playing Freelancer and Eve in years past. I have been looking awhile now for a good new space game to enjoy. After playing SG1, I am even more excited now for the release of SG2. Well done, Little Green Men!

Sadly I bought this game as part of a bundle a while ago, after playing the pretty good starpoint gemini: warlords, but the issue at hand is, this game does not work for windows 10. Other than the tutorial, trying to start a game will result in a crash to desktop. Having said that, from the 30 minutes I was able to experience this, the tutorial is horrendous. The instructor, that uses the exact same portrait as the default character (which is the only one available)(i.e: not great for immersion from the get-go) speaks in a barely audible russian-like voice and bombards you with information about the interface way before you need to use it. You have no way to check what he previously said either so you might have to go by trial and error after the information barrage ends and you need to actually do stuff. This game feels extremely dated. Again, from the 30 minutes I could appreciate it, I had a huge rejection to the tutorial and the way it was presented. The character creation seems like it was done on MS paint! I had no problem getting into old games with shoddy graphics and clunky interfaces, but this was ridiculous. They might as well used a static portrait picture and leave it at that. It would have been much better. I bought this just in order to get to know the story. Since it doesn't work on windows 10, now I'm stuck with this unuseable piece of software, that even if I wanted to push from my initial aversion and see what it has to offer, I can't. Steam should not push games that don't run on the de-facto operative system.

Tutorial take 1 "Hey I have locked your control while you have to listen to my entirely out of context diatribe which I call tutorial" Some minutes of bla bla "Click Close" I click "Close". nothing happens. Ok thats the tutorial? Less suffering for me I start pushing random buttons, ship starts moving. "you were not allowed to move, tutorial failed" ..... ok.... thats one way to handle it Tutorial take 2 By exhausting all clickable options in exactly the correct sequence I get the boring diatribe to continue. "Fly to the station" ok, I can do that. The station looks weird, somehow ghostly. Took me some time to realize that you can see the shadows of objects through other objects. I don't even know if the campaign is playable. I couldn't take the "tutorial"

I really can't recommend Starpoint Gemini. This was LGM Games' first project, and I'm afraid it shows. I can see what they were going for, but it just doesn't come together in a satisfying way. Presentation-wise, the game manages to look dated (ship models) and beautiful (nebulas and planet vistas) at the same time. I can live with that. I could't live with the voice acting though, which I'm sure must be done by the dev team, or someone they kidnapped off the street. Fortunately for the sake of your sanity you can turn this off. More worrying though is the UI, which is confused, overly complicated, and a royal pain in the ass. Even basics such as turning your ship aren't handled well: you can either left click to turn the ship towards the point you clicked, which is useless for anything to the side or behind you, or you can hit the A and D keys which turn the ship in what seem like 30 degree increments per press, with multiple presses resulting in prolonged spinning until the key presses wear off. It's manageable once you get used to it, but it's painful and makes combat a drag. That's a pity because the combat engine is fun at first, it's nicely tactical and lasers sizzle and whump appropriately, but I found it soon became frustrating due mainly to the very high early difficulty; your ship only has a narrow firing arc, everything else it seems can out-turn you, so lining up to take a shot means your front shields are quickly toasted with you being barbequed shortly afterwards. The other problem is that the living universe is merciless, and high level rogue (pirate) ships crash your nice low-level party with frustrating regularity. I had to replay the first mission about four times because I kept getting jumped by high level pirates that laid waste to everyone including my puny level 1 ship. It's a pity the quicksave button doesn't work, because you have to save a lot... except it doesn't actually let you save during the prolonged and tedious dialogs and during mission events. Eventually you start to get a handle on things, and there were moments such as the first time I flew inside a nebula that the game almost starts to sing, but then it's gone. Side-missions from stations largely involve flying to a point and clicking a couple of icons, or flying to a rogue ship and getting blasted within seconds. After a few hours I realised that I just wasn't having any fun because I'd played this game before in much better forms. However, the silver lining is Starpoint Gemini 2, which is apparently so massively better as to be a completely different game. I'd start there if I were you.

Most space sim fans will be turned off by the fact that combat and flight is only 2d movement. Aside from that it is not a bad space game. Starpoint Gemini 2 is vastly better. My advice is buy Starpoint Gemini 2 and play the original campaign in the starpoint 2 game engine, "Play through the 30 storyline missions of the original Starpoint Gemini, re-envisioned as free DLC for Starpoint Gemini 2!"

Starpoint Gemini is a very good game in many ways. The missions are great and test your skills almost to a point of frustration (Save often). After each mission you are given free play untill you reach a certain level at which time the next mission begins, this free play time is to make money and upgrade your ship, weapons and shields, use it to your advantage and the missions are a little easier, squander them or rush to advance makes life tough. Downsides are the game is based on an unrealistic 2 planes (no up or down) and the frequent crashes when jumping to new systems (game autosaves at each jumpgate so when it crashes you restart at the gate you crashed at). There are other little downsides in the game, like slow docking, random attacks that you can't win (again, save often) and systems that don't load right in the missions (not often) that makes you reload to continue. Although this game is a little weak on realistic space flight it is a very engaging game that I find myself playing for hours on end and seldom tire of. It has it's quirks as any game does and if you ever played a game called Freelancer this game would be a distant second, but I love to play it and would recommend it to anyone who loves open universe space epics. Great missions and storyline mixed with great free play make this one a must have.

I wanted to like this game. I put over 70 hours into it. What I liked about it was the simplified controls - WSAD. The game was easy to get into. Despite the Russian voice acting, there was a storyline of sorts. What hooked me initially was the desire to upgrade my ship, weaponry, shields, equipment and captain skills. The combat system is essentially about shield management and trying to manoeuvre your ship to the enemies weakest point (typically rear) whilst delivering maximum damage. Many times I found myself spinning my ship so I could round-robin fire my weapons to suit their firing arc. Play the game and you will understand what I mean. There are missions to do and what is akin to boss fights. But it all gets a bit monotonous. Mining is boring. The missions are repetitive. Travelling to different sectors is tedious, having to navigate to the jump points. The T-drive makes it a little easier, but some missions require jumps of 10 sectors or more, which is a chore. Having maxed out my ship, crew and talents, I kept playing the game, hoping for a grand finale. It was a let down. I persisted with this game and I should not have. Oh it also crashes regularly, so save often.

**WARNING** Do not purchase this if you are running WIN 10, this game will not run the main campaign under any conditions. I was able to run the tutorial itself, but this was unfortunately about it. I've contacted support about this issue, and when/if I get a response I will update this review. -- Update: Devs stated that the game is old and only supports Windows XP/Windows Vista/Windows 7. Here is the issue: Windows XP is not any longer supported by Microsoft and neither is Vista since April of this year: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/22882/windows-vista-end-of-support Windows 7 Mainstream Support ended in 2015, and security updates run until 2020, and although I am certain it's popular, I'm sure most are starting to 'jump ship'. This leaves this Steam game with very few cumbersome options as to how to actually get it to run, virtual machine running in your preferred OS, or run it in an older dedicated installation of Windows. Not saying the game isn't good, I think it's good as long as you can get it to run. However, considering the fact that it is getting fairly cumbersome for users to actually run it, in addition to the fact that it has no ongoing support; perhaps it may be time for this product to be gracefully pulled from Steam. Due to these issues, this game is certainly not worth it at $13.99, and even if anyone is considering purchasing it, they should only consider it on an extreme discounted sale (90% or better). I certainly understand the fact you are a small dev team, and are focusing on other projects at this point (love the other games you put out and all seem to work well), just wanted to provide some general feedback on this to anyone looking to purchase this game. If the intent is to keep the game up for sale, I would however recommend trying to at least rebuild the source on a newer system and just provide a basic patch. EDIT: ------- Post WIN 10 patch release - I was still running into issues loading this game, but I was able to bypass the issue: Here is what you can do to see if the issue is the same for you. I installed it on two systems (one running RADEON and another NVIDIA) and I actually got it to work on both by disabling the Nvidia and radeon built-in overlays, I'm guessing there is just something incompatible with the overlays and this stops the game. If you are running these you can disable these by going through your GFORCE settings (cog wheel) and hit the slider to disable and try the game again it should work (screenshot: https://share.getcloudapp.com/7KuR1510). If you are running RADEON, use their software to disable it - go to look for and hit the slider to turn it off. Once these are disabled the game should run (screenshot: https://share.getcloudapp.com/JruWAJkR). Video: -------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lhQWK1-Ovk