Starpoint Gemini Warlords Review
Starpoint Gemini: Warlords is a unique blend of EVE, X3 and Stellaris with all your usual space shenanigans simplified. You won't find a deep economy system, or a complex political scale, detailed fleet management, or some tedious way of building stations that take you 40-50 hours to even start. Read reviews and ratings of Starpoint Gemini Warlords from our experts, and see what our community says, too!
Posted: 10 AprilCan be fun to play initially, but quickly falls apart after that. The game quickly becomes repetitive, with larger ships playing exactly the same as smaller ones but with slower acceleration. Larger ships use the EXACT same weapons as smaller ones, just more of them and with the largest ones also getting access to fighters.
Fighters are one of the most poorly balanced mechanics I've ever seen in a game. Each individual fighter (not even a bomber mind you) does more damage than a Frigate (lower middle class ship) while coming in groups of 3-6, in addition to having infinite ammo and being indestructible. Smaller ships become quickly and completely obsolete because they don't have any advantages over larger ships in combat, even factoring in resource costs, and no purpose outside of combat.
A game that wants to be a lite RPG, a lite RTS, and a space opera sim all at once, and almost succeeds at each of them. This near brush with greatness will frustrate many but will also satisfy many a hardcore science fiction fan needing something a little different.Starpoint Gemini 2 charmed me despite its flaws and weirdness, so I was pretty eager to give Warlords a shot when I saw it pop up in the store in Spring 2018. The price was fair and I already knew what to expect more or less. I was hoping for a similar experience as the last entry, albeit improved.In some ways, Warlords does feel tighter and more responsive.
The controls feel more solid, and the game doesn't hiccup every time you enter a new zone. The framerate seems to hold together better (until you get a certain number of ships on screen), and certain annoyances, like pirates and other random encounters constantly knocking you out of PTE mode, have been removed.Unfortunately, the game is still beset by bugs and oddities, in every aspect. Even simple things, like whose portrait is on the screen during dialogue, is often wrong, killing what little RPG immersion I feel the game has.
You can now command your own fleets in this game, which is awesome, but ally AI is so unreliable and demands too much attention from the player, for it to feel like it is more of a boon than a burden. Sometimes your ally ships will sit there and get pummeled without even firing a shot back until you intervene and issue a command that will snap the AI out of whatever routine it is stuck in. Ally escorts will also usually drop out of sublight speed to engage any random encounter that pops up, a further annoyance when you're trying to venture somewhere far away with backup.
Eventually I discovered, especially once you can afford a strong enough ship, that you're better off flying solo and letting your fleets do their thing remotely.This is where Warlords engages some aspects of a RTS game, where you issue orders to your fleets on a starchart, having them engage enemy fleets, and take over hostile territories by attacking space stations. This sounds fun until you realize that there is no variety or dynamic to this part of the game.
The war ends.There's no cinematic ending or achievement. This war of mine free. Confirmed that you only have to replace 'storiessavedgames' and 'storiessavedgames.alt' files.
Battles are all about stacking numbers in your favor. There is no benefit or incentive to build anything but capital ships, as the rest are just fodder that you'll have to continually replace. Invading enemy territory is always the same: you start taking over zones, the enemy maybe sends a fleet or two into your territory to counterattack, but otherwise they sit back and take whatever abuse you dish out.
Even in the later game when you gain the ability to conquer planets with what is effectively a siege cannon, the invasion event always plays out exactly the same way every time. As there is no real dialogue, roleplaying, or any kind of real trading or faction systems, all that is left to do after the main story is done, is to conquer the map, which is an exercise in repetition.Despite all, I still found a lot to enjoy in Starpoint Gemini: Warlords. The game looks pretty, though perhaps not as dynamically so as its prequel. The music selection is limited but sets the mood and atmosphere well, and the voiceovers and sound effects, while not mind-blowing, do what they need to adequately. There is still a thrill in exploration and seeing what awesome vistas there are in the Gemini system, and discovering and tinkering with new ship designs and classes has a strong appeal, as there is a nice variety in crafts to command.For achievement hunters, be prepared to suffer.
The game's worst bugs have since been patched, and achievements mostly work correctly now, but there's a reason why the ratios are high. Many accomplishments in the game require a substantial investment in time or patience. You also need to be mindful of the game's moderately steep learning curve (if you're new to space sims in general) and sometimes surprisingly brutal difficulty.Ultimately, if you're in the mood for a space sim in the vein of Elite or Freelancer but have already played those and need a different fix, I'd recommend trying Starpoint Gemini 2 first before giving Warlords a go.