As the Xbox One’s catalogue of games deepen the variety of genres on offer widens. With the ID@Xbox program now in full wonderful swing every different type of video game is quickly being catered for, from point and click adventures to space trading and combat sims, such as Starpoint Gemini 2. Developed by Little Green Men Games (LGM) a smaller indy developer from Zagreb in Croatia, Starpoint Gemini 2 (SG2) is a port of a PC game released in 2014 after a very successful campaign on Steam Early Access.
I am always drawn to games such as this due to fond memories of being lost for hundreds of hours in titles such as the criminally underrated Freelancer and the Genre defining Freespace series. Something about the scope and the promise of exploring a galaxy and making your mark upon it, be it for good or evil spoke to me in ways other genres never did. Due to this the modern resurgence in popularity for the genre fills me with nostalgic glee.
I suspect it is for these reasons LGM decided to port the PC version off SG2 onto Xbox One. Seizing an opportunity to bring their title to a wider audience on a platform with little competition. The main competitor on Xbox One is the crowd funded Elite Dangerous and even that comes at the genre from a different point of view. The main difference between the two games and one I thoroughly enjoyed is the fact that in SG2 you are a larger ‘capital’ ship in comparison to Elites ‘fighters’. While the size of your vessel in Elite always made me feel vulnerable and at risk, my beefier and more capable vessel in SG2 made me feel far more confident to explore, attack and dominate the galaxy.
At the start of SG2 you are presented with a choice, to play the game in a campaign or free play mode. The campaign on offer here is quite the amusing experience, though I suspect that wasn’t intended. For the most part the voice acting for the sometimes lengthy bouts of dialogue and exposition is at best hammy and at worse, laughably bad. While I appreciate it’s addition the quality for the most part is a little unprofessional, but to LGM’s credit all of those involved sounded like they were certainly having fun. The actual content of the campaign revolves around a series of quite cookie cutter encounters and objectives. While far from stellar the experience did feel like it was more of an extended tutorial rather than a genuine narrative, long screens of exposition aside. After the campaign concludes you are able to continue in freeplay mode.
Freeplay mode however is more like what you would expect from a game such as this. Dropped into a large galaxy in which you are given the freedom to basically do as you please. Explore, destroy, befriend or trade, the space of SG2 is filled with the options and choices you would hope to find within a game of this genre. Your larger vessel traverses the expanse as you would expect and improves as you level and save money to upgrade it. I for one like the big ships, managing it’s systems, diverting full power to weapons and blowing smaller vessels out of existence is satisfying as well as often challenging. While you only control one ship directly you can hire mercenaries to fly with you and launch fighters (when you get the right kind of ship).
There is so much depth to how you can micro manage your experience it can be bewildering at first. From levelling up your character RPG style, to upgrading and purchasing new system, to deciding on what the best trade goods are SG2 is full of interconnected system and it will reward a dedicated and thoughtful player. It’s clear this game is a product of the genre and it makes few allowances for new players. The port is a mostly successful one but its clear it wasn’t easy fitting all the complex menus and screens onto a controller friendly interface. LGM get most of the way there, text can be too small for comfortable reading on the couch and the radial menus are confusing at times. This is made worse by the game lacking a real tutorial, though the in game help screen is actually surprisingly detailed and works well in lieu of a real manual, never have I missed one more than with SG2.
Some technical issues also plague SG2 which surprised me considering the age of the game. The game hitches every time you enter a new named part of space and will sometimes hitch randomly as well. It also doesn’t look that great and suffers with a surprising amount of pop in, stellar objects such as asteroids or even man made installations would often just fade into existence in front of you, often far closer than you would expect. Space in general looks OK, though not beautiful, the lack of variety can mean that flying from A to B can sometimes lack excitement. In general textures are a little muddy and reflect the age and I suspect limited team and budget size for the game.
I certainly had fun with Starpoint Gemmi 2. While the game is showing it’s age and LGM only got about eighty percent of the way to a perfect port of the game, the experience is still enjoyable and for me oddly relaxing. I felt like I understood the universe I was within and the nostalgia of playing a genre I was so familiar with from my childhood certainly helped me enjoy the experience despite its flaws. SG2 is full of systems and it suffers from a complex and bewildering series of menus that don’t quite work on console, to newcomers it will take hours to grasp the mechanics at play and to really ‘get’ the game. But I would encourage you to give it a go. Space combat and trading sims are not for the faint of heart, but they do reward the dedicated. What LGM has created here is full of charm and quirk and more than a little jank, but you will have fun discovering all that it has to offer, if you have the time needed to dedicate to it.