Starcom: Unknown Space Reviews

I felt blessed having bumped into Nexus during a random scrolling spree on the Steam store page several years ago. The developer creates such fantastic stories, with all kinds of fun threads, encounters, and ideas. It captures the grand space opera feel so well with amazing set pieces, interesting characters, engaging interactions, a galaxy that feels alive, and a deep narrative urging you along in the background. In both Unknown Space and Nexus, I was continuously torn between random exploring, pushing the narrative, completing little side quests, and looking for a fight to test my newest build-out. A true delight.

I once mused that taking the experiences of a research vessel in Stellaris would make a great game. This comes very, very close to that. Despite the promo trailers this is NOT a bulletstorm type game. It is much more focused on the discovery aspect of exploration than the shoot-em-up aspect, though you certainly can play that way if you choose to. Some puzzles/quest lines are easy to follow, but the player is often rewarded by carefully reading log entries and searching for things that aren't so explicit. My singular gripe is that the replay value could be enhanced by making the map at least partially procedurally generated for each playthough. Still, I enjoyed two back-to-back playthroughs.

Its one of those games whose whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Everything just combines to make a great overall experience!

I liked the combat and build stuff, but the missions required too much attention to follow, were often too wordy and not easy to pickup if you didn't know what to do next. Tested patience too often. Also I feel that when you have research trees and such, it should consistently describe the benefit of the research in exact terms. Whilst some research says 'Gives x% more y' some just say 'Better X' which then makes it hard to know what you might like

Wow. 31 hours, and what a ride. It all started in my little hunk of junk, with a puny plasma canon, explored strange galaxies in my makeshift enterprise (with phasers) and met dozens of new species. And now, in my dreadnaught, I finished the game. There were still unfinished misions (and even some undiscovered, let alone researched, tech), but I decided I wanted something for my next playthrough. Before that starts though, I wanted to take some time and write my high praise. This game is awesome. You start out with a small ship that you gradually build out by researching tech you discover along the way, and materials you find or mine out in space. Or you trade for them. Gradually, your small ship becomes a dreadnaught, armed to the teeth and lightning fast. The fun thing is you can design it from the ground up. The story is great, gameplay feels good, good controls, sound is great, music is too (although at points I turned it off to play some star trek music (which I'd highly recommend you do at some point: flying through a dust cloud, shooting asteroids while the theme from voyager plays made me misty eyed). So, whatever you do, do yourself a big favor and just buy this game already. You won't be disappointed. There, now that I've written my review, I think it's time to start my second playthrough. Time to make some different choices this time.

Oh, yeah, dude. This game is freakin' awesome. Perfect combo of relaxed yet immersive, well-paced action, and smartly-written sci-fi. The aesthetics and graphics are gorgeous, the gameplay is easy and smooth---it's exactly what I've been wanting in a low-fi space RTS game. If you're unsure which of the two sister games to get first (if you can't get both), get this one. Nexus is fine but this one is much better. I said this in my review for Nexus, I can most definitely see this is one of those games I can play before bedtime. Two thumbs way up. Buy this game.

Would give maybe a more neutral review if I could instead of the thumbs up. The game is fun for what it is, but it's really limited in scope and you can really feel those limitations a lot the further you get in the game. Quest design is rather simplistic but it's fun to go out and explore new systems until the anomalies start to repeat themselves. Ship design is also really constrained with limited variations of systems and "building blocks". Forget about making that cool dreadnought you always wanted to build, there is a hard limit to the total amount of blocks you can place instead of being constrained by the resources you have. But yeah, the game is mostly fine, but for all the tantalizing glimpses of what could have been it leaves a bit of a bitter aftertaste once you've completed it. Get it on sale, you probably won't regret it then.

"Sid Meier's Pirates! in Space" An absolute gem! I am very disappointed about not having the ability to dance with the daughters of alien governors though...

This is banger of a space exploration game. This game leans harder in the space exploration direction than games like Rebel Galaxy and I LOVE IT. This game makes me want to go back and replay StarCom: Nexus, the previous game in the series (also a banger). Pros: - Some missions have subtle clues where you need to use the well-implemented search function to revisit information/locations that new information has revealed to be important. This feature is well implemented and resulted in a bunch of fun ah-ha! moments. Cons: - I missed a few things during natural exploration and had to consult the forums/guides. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some of the mission clues are pretty subtle (but there) and I don't fault the developer when I miss clues. - There were few missions where the mission tracker should have been more explicit about the location of the mission giver for the final mission turn-in. While the log search function works great, it feels like busy work when I forgot where X race is located. Maybe space races should have labelled territories on the map?

really fun! Despite the remainder of what I'm writing below, I do recommend this game. I wish it had an "endless" mode at the end. I mean you went through SO MUCH effort to produce something with such great quality, but the end it just drops to the credits. Why not make tiers, increase difficulty, increase costs, increase xp --- endlessly. Really enjoyed playing this, but it will sit in my steam inventory for the remainder of my life, since once you beat it, it's done.