Starpoint Gemini Reviews
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Out of Eight winds up giving it a 7/8:
Starpoint Gemini features a nice combination of tactical combat and extensive role-playing features that support a wide variety of overall strategy. You can truly undertake any of the game's possible career paths, like trade, repair, piracy, research, salvaging, mining, or a mixture. While most games of the space adventure ilk offer the same possibilities, Starpoint Gemini takes things a step further by offering thirty-eight skills and eighteen perks earned through experience (and officers you can hire for additional skills), along with twenty-one special abilities spread across fifty ships. This amount of variety is fantastic, allowing you to forge any path of your liking. Missions are also varied, providing your primary source of income in the game since the trade interface leaves room for improvement. Tactical combat is quite enjoyable: the combination of weapon arcs, shield orientations, maneuvers, and special abilities makes for fun, challenging battles against the adept AI. The mouse-driven interface makes you feel more like a captain and less like a pilot, though it could benefit from additional features like camera rotation and clearer indications of available weapons. The story-driven campaign features thirty scripted missions plus free-form interludes, rendering the sandbox mode a limited offering. The tutorial is a pain and Starpoint Gemini lacks multiplayer, but there is good value for $30 thanks to important features and nice graphics. Starpoint Gemini is what Star Trek Legacy (and Starfleet Command, for that matter) should have been, and the robust career options and a plethora of role-playing customization features in addition to solid tactical combat only sweeten the deal.
While Rock, Paper, Shotgun doesn't find quite as much to be excited about:
It's all shiny and pretty, but really the presentation, in both the world and the UI, is fairly old fashioned and unremarkable. The lighting and palette is undramatic, and the ship designs could have emerged from any space game in the past 15 years. The music, too, was best replaced with some Tim Hecker for improved atmospherics. All that said, I can see why Starpoint Gemini has impressed a few people who persisted with it over the Christmas break. There's a lot there, and the appeal of just living out the life of a roaming spaceman never really loses its lustre. Worth a look, then, just don't be expecting a masterpiece.
