Star Traders: Frontiers Reviews

There are very few games of this type with the same amount of options and freedom. Star Traders has many different objectives and styles of play: trading, pirating, spying, salvaging, exploring planets, bounty hunting, doing faction missions, and more. All of these things are supported by a whole mountain of different systems, none of which are terribly complex, but there are so many! The game has quite a learning curve. You can really get into the weeds leveling up your captain and crew, building ships, and managing your factions and contacts. If you don't want to experiment (and reference the game's wiki), this might be frustrating. I like that Star Trader offers very little direction. It's a big sandbox! You can start the game and immediately go wherever you want and do whatever you want. However, you really have to set your own goals and make your own fun. Some people (me) will like that, but many won't!

It's different. Good, weird and can be frustrating to understand why things are the way they are but it was unique.

This game is definitely complex, and I get absolutely steamed when I'm looking for a slightly restricted item and visit a world that SHOULD sell it but their trade law is too high, but this has to be one of the greatest Dune-like star captain simulators ever to be created. I love making new friends with princes and pirates, and I love dabbing on bounty hunters with short range hyperspace jumps to always escape. When I pull off a job that has taken me across 6+ sectors and I had to secure multiple items or job steps, I feel really satisfied. My only suggestions would be some kind of search feature based off visited worlds to find one that should sell something (such as if I need raw spice, a way to see where it's sold and if I have a trade permit for that faction) and maybe some way to skip crew/ship combat (they're fun but if you're not built for it you will be miserable and it's possibly turned off from the game if starting out which is unfortunate).

[h1]Star Traders: Frontiers – Space is Big, Complicated, and Weirdly Full of Dice[/h1] There’s something oddly compelling about commanding a spaceship while babysitting a crew of misfits with skill trees longer than most tax codes. [b]Star Traders: Frontiers[/b] doesn’t ease you in—it hurls you headfirst into a sprawling universe of political backstabbing, daring space heists, and dialogue trees that might accidentally ignite an interstellar war. At first glance, it looks like a standard crew-based RPG set in space. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find a rich sandbox full of emergent narratives. Want to be a pirate? Sure. Merchant? Go ahead. Diplomat, spy, assassin, mailman? It’s all on the table. And the game doesn’t hold your hand while you figure it out, either—it tosses you into the galactic deep end and expects you to swim, or at least float with dignity. The worldbuilding is exceptional. Every faction has their quirks, grudges, and long-standing feuds, and getting involved in their drama feels dangerously fun. The main storyline is more than just filler—it’s full of choices that actually change outcomes, with moral grey zones that would make a philosophy major sweat. And let’s not forget the diplomacy. You can make deals, break them, and regret your decisions all in the same breath. Combat, both in space and on the ground, is tactical and satisfying. You'll spend time equipping your ship, customizing your officers, and managing crew morale like a stressed-out HR rep in zero gravity. It’s got a satisfying depth, and there’s a thrill in watching a plan come together—unless it doesn’t, because the dice decided today was not your day. Yes, the dice. They’re the core mechanic of every skill check, and while they look cool in motion, it’s not always clear what your odds actually are. A cleaner percentage display might’ve been more intuitive, but in a way, the dice reinforce the game's roguelike unpredictability. You win some. You roll terribly and lose some. And speaking of roguelike—this game has incredible replay value. Every career, every starting condition, every faction allegiance spins out a completely different experience. It's the kind of game that will keep whispering "just one more run" long after you should’ve gone to bed. The cherry on top? The developers. The Trese Brothers continue to update the game with meaningful, free content years after its release. It’s the kind of post-launch support that feels rare and genuine. If there were an intergalactic medal for good indie devs, these guys would be up there. [hr][/hr] [b]Pros:[/b] [list] [*] Deep tactical gameplay and ship customization [*] Compelling world with great story depth and branching paths [*] Tons of replayability [*] Indie devs still adding great free content [/list] [b]Cons:[/b] [list] [*] The UI can be intimidating to new players [*] Dice mechanics can feel too opaque [*] Names are borderline unpronounceable [*] Graphics are functional but won’t blow your space socks off [/list] [b]Final score: 8/10[/b] If you're the kind of player who enjoys getting lost in layered mechanics, political power plays, and rolling the dice on a wild narrative path, Star Traders: Frontiers might just become your new space obsession. Just make peace with forgetting every NPC’s name five seconds after reading it.

The learning curve is steep. But once you get the hang of things, take off the training wheels & take this for a good spin & enjoy!! All games get repetitive, but at least this lets you do it a bunch of different ways :)

Don't be put off by the graphics. This game goes above and beyond to give an experience that is challenging, whilst having good story, clever design and levels upon levels of complexity.

No Dlcs, they have been updating the game for 7 years and running.

I love this game - lots of depth and different ways to succeed. It is very much Traveller on the computer.

Just get this gem - it's made with love and deep understanding, very polished, still to this day updated and very addictive - just one more turn addictive :D

tl;dr: The meta for this game is to [i]not[/i] play it the way the developers want you to play it. This is bad. ... As someone with 90 hours, I can safely say that, while there is a lot of good, Star Traders: Frontiers is a product of bad game design. Massive overlapping and complex systems which are fun to learn. This is good. Figuring out — after multiple dozens of hours — just how boned you will be on every playthrough via RNG and difficulty scaling that is never, EVER explained unless you go meta. This is bad. Giant replayability factor, and being incentivized to specialize your builds. This is good. Virtually no compromises possible to be anything resembling a jack of all trades, nor can you even be a skill monkey- you MUST pick and choose what your build is good at. This is bad. A huge variety of ships and components to chose from, offering many options for building the perfect starship. This is good. You are HEAVILY discouraged from experimenting or deviating from your build. You know, the build that you totally had fully planned out before you even pressed "Play Game". This is bad. A wealth of options to pursue in a galaxy of political intrigue. This is good. Absolutely absurd opinion mechanics, the backflips you have to perform to keep opinion in check. For example, you could be hired to be a neutral third party in a hostage exchange. The exchange could be described in-game as going the most respectable and professional way possible... yet you [i]still[/i] lose -8 opinion with the opposite faction. I could give endless examples on the opinion mechanics alone. This is bad. Multiple ways to earn cash, from trading to bounty hunting to pirating. This is good. A singular, objectively best way of making money that blows every other avenue out of the water. This is bad. A robust, exciting combat system, both with ships and with crew. This is good. An unbelievable amount of unintentional obfuscation. It took the developers 5 YEARS to realize they should show the accuracy dice rolls on-screen when an attack happens instead of being buried in a wall of text accessed through a sub-menu nobody uses. And they only made the change because a player suggested it to them- the devs didn't even think of this themselves. This is bad. I could go on. Really, I could. I haven't even touched upon the medical mechanics, or the unintuitive usage of perks, or the fact that it is even possible to accidentally let an entire year or more fly by with a single misclick while repairing your ship (and again, the more time that passes = an exponential difficulty increase). My point is that... and this is going to sound ridiculous at first... when the developers hear feedback like this, they do exactly what devs are not supposed to do: they defend themselves and change nothing. Dogwater opinion, right? The devs are clearly just defending their vision, right? Well, consider the author of an upcoming book. If a proofreader says, "I don't understand this part," what the author MUST NOT do is just explain it to the proofreader in-person. This accomplishes worse than nothing, because the book scene remains unchanged and actual readers will also not understand the scene. What the author MUST do is rewrite the scene so that actual future readers do not feel confused. Much like Crusader Kings 3 (or any game of massive complexity), when you *know* how to wrestle a game to its knees, you can't *unknow*. And just like that, all fun is gone. Did I ever have fun playing Star Traders: Frontiers? Yes, when I was naive to its flaws. Will I ever have fun playing it again? No, I don't think I will. I don't think I even can.