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Exploring the Solar System on a prototype ship, and meeting some sweaty aliens.Like and subscribe or whatever.
Aired on ABC affiliate KSTP-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota and shown during the movie “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock”List of Commercials- Kraft ...
- 10 min
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- tvandmoviearchive
Star Control: Origins is a reboot of the Star Control franchise, which combines storytelling, exploration, combat, questing, fleet management, trading, diplo...
Jul 7, 2020 · Lee Hutchinson – Jul 7, 2020 11:10 am. 15. Directed by Sean Dacanay, edited by Marcus Niehaus. Click here for transcript. In December of 2018, Ars was lucky enough to sit down with Fred Ford and ...
- Lee Hutchinson
- 133 min
- In space it's a great adventure, but on the ground it's a drag.
- Star Control: Origins Screenshots
- Verdict
By Dan Stapleton
Updated: Apr 21, 2020 1:50 am
Posted: Sep 20, 2018 5:00 pm
By introducing an entirely new and mysterious universe full of colorful, hilarious aliens and bringing back the intense arcadey space battles, Star Control: Origins gets about two thirds of the way toward recapturing the magic of Star Control 2, the revered 1992 adventure about forming an interstellar alliance against a greater threat. If it weren’t for the tedious chore of gathering resources from planets’ surfaces, it’d be a revival to celebrate.
As humanity takes its first step into the stars we find we’re not alone, and that many of our neighbors are delightfully stupid. There’s the pathetically needy Tywom banana slugs, the obsessively bureaucratic Measured, a sleazy race of con artists who’re basically Watto from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with longer necks, and plenty more – each stranger and more surprising than the last. All the major aliens have a distinct style and personality that’s brought to life by diverse character models and fun voice acting.
The absurdist and occasionally laugh-out-loud humor of Star Control: Origins’ dialogue is its greatest asset, and it uses it effectively to cover up some of its deficiencies – there are various jokes about why every member of each alien race looks and sounds exactly like the others, for example. Listening to aliens casually discuss interstellar fish genocide or the proper number of ears to everyone should have is usually well worth taking the time. Dialogue could’ve used a bit more variety for common interactions, though: having every conversation with the malfunctioning starbase AI end with “EXCEPTION - CIVIL FAREWELL NOT FOUND!” and every rescue when you run out of fuel come at the cost of listening to the Tywom’s god-awful Star Trek fanfic gets old pretty quickly.
Once I hit the point about two-thirds of the way through the story where money no longer seemed to matter as much because I was able to get all the resources I needed from running the story missions instead of landing on planets, things improved considerably. The story became much more interesting and expansive, and boss fights and new enemy types made space battles even more diverse and challenging.
Space is where the real action is, and the punchy, top-down arcadey space combat is the most fun I had in Star Control: Origins.
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Space is where the real action is, and the punchy, top-down arcadey space combat (which is almost directly lifted from the original games) is the most fun I had in Star Control: Origins. These one-on-one arena battles have a lot of variety thanks to a wide selection of offensive and defensive abilities. There are straightforward missiles, beams, and laser bolts, but also mines, area-of-effect attacks, shields, cloaking devices, speed bursts, and many more. Each ship gets a combination of two abilities in addition to its own speed, acceleration, turn rate, recharge rate, and durability, and that keeps dogfights interesting as you bounce off of planets’ gravity wells, warp through wormholes (which can also teleport projectiles), and pick up stat-boost items. Judging a target’s trajectory well enough to peg it with a relatively slow-moving missile by while simultaneously shifting your own ship’s movement to avoid incoming fire is a good challenge, and outmaneuvering a slow, heavy-hitting ship with a nimble but fragile fighter craft feels great. It makes a lot of sense that this head-to-head combat was what Stardock chose to break out as its Fleet Battles multiplayer mode, which can be played against the AI (which actually gets tough!), online, or in local two-player mode.
Like with Fleet Battles, in the campaign you can collect a fleet of ships to send into combat before you endanger your flagship (which must survive or it’s game over) but the vast majority of those I found felt pointless. If I was up against an inferior opponent it made the most sense to send in my much more powerful flagship to destroy it quickly; if I was facing a strong enemy, like a Scryve battlecruiser, the weaker ships in my fleet would be destroyed comically quickly with area-of-effect attacks and my flagship was the only one that stood a chance. It doesn’t help that Star Control: Origins doesn’t give you a view of the capabilities of your ships or your opponent’s ships at the moment you’re selecting which one to use, so it’s extremely easy to pick one that has no chance at all against the attacker.
Though the ships are in general creatively designed, I found it weird that even though this is a game about bolting alien tech onto your human-built spacecraft to dramatically improve its speed, capacity, and combat abilities, the look of your flagship doesn’t change at all from start to finish no matter how many fancy engines and weapons you acquire. That’s especially bizarre considering that since this is a game that includes a highly customizable ship-builder tool for use in Fleet Battles that allows you piece together a custom craft from a healthy assortment of parts. When the technology is built in already, why would Stardock would completely miss this important, rewarding aspect of an action-RPG upgrade loop?
Star Control: Origins does a great job of creating a new universe and stocking it with a diverse range of weird and funny aliens to fight in intense arcadey space battles. But everything you’re forced to do on a planet’s surface is boring at best and an annoying chore at worst, and that kills a lot of momentum. Because of that, I didn’t really star...
Star Control: Origins does a great job bringing back the classic game's humorous aliens and energetic 2D space battles, but everything you do on the ground is a chore. Dan Stapleton Read Review
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Jun 26, 2024 · About the Star Control Franchise. Star Control is a science-fiction video game series that takes place in a set of loosely linked universes, where humanity has begun to explore the galaxy and encounter alien civilizations. Existing games in the series include Star Control, Star Control II, Star Control 3, and Star Control: Origins.
