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OFFICIAL Starpoint Gemini II (Review)

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Introduction

Starpoint Gemini II is primarily a space simulator game, with a small portion of RPG elements, that include activated skills and also a perk system, that applies similarly to RPG talent trees. The game is also extremely close to being a full blow 4X game, however on release (current version 1.005), there are some relatively incomplete features that the devs are still implementing. The game is developed by Little Green Men Games, and published by Iceberg Interactive. The developers are part of Intercorona, who were undoubtedly known for the original Starpoint Gemini. Very little in terms of PR was done with the Early Access title, with only Steam and the forums being their primary source of advertisement.

Storyline

Largely based where the original left off, you take command of the previous game’s primary character’s son. The general story and campaign was largely ham-fisted into the game during the final months of development, with most players basing their entire experiences on the freeroam gameplay, which is also where the devs recommend people spend most of their time. A lot of the time they mention Freelancer as a main inspiration for the game and campaign, and I can see why. Without being too negative about the quality of a story and dialogue in an Early Access title, the script writing is quite frankly awful, and most of the voice actors are equally bad. With Freelancer in mind, the campaign is largely based around obtaining main missions, go here, do this, rinse and repeat. The missions are relatively varied, and it’s relatively difficult to take any of the storyline seriously because it’s voiced and written so poorly. Most of the community is familiar with the following scene:


Yes, that just happened, and yes, that was actually written and is now immortalised into digital gaming forever. Most of the SPG2 forum strongly recommends most new and experienced players stick to the freeroam, as that’s where all of the content and gameplay features are. After playing the freeroam for 26 hours, I hardly think the campaign really needs to exist, as freeroam is where all the development time has clearly been spent. It would probably have been wiser to skip the story mode until they had enough money for a better writer and voice actors. All that being said, the campaign does now feature a good tutorial. I’d probably recommend new players open up the campaign and do the first few missions. Perhaps with the sound muted and subtitles turned off.


Gameplay

Freeroam is probably the best part to review in terms of gameplay, as it is pretty feature rich, and the devs have a “wishlist” of features they are waiting to implement shortly after bugs have been squished, and balancing has been done. The game features literally dozens if not almost a hundred ships, including more on the workshop. They range from the 1st tiny ship class, destroyers, up to the very large and rather menacing Carrier and Battleship class. One particular ship was my favourite, but not necessarily the most overpowered ship, the Paladin, as it reminded me of the USS Aircraft carriers in real life. True to their names, most of the Carrier class ships can indeed harbour 3 squadrons of fighters. These fighters come in a range of 2 ships squadrons to 5 ships squadrons, all with different roles, including bombers, interceptors, and general fighter to fighter ships. The game is truly an absolute treat for those wanting to climb the ranks to captain and take the helm of a capital ship bulldozer. Here’s a quick video on being a pirate and stealing ships:


There is a small issue with balance right now, boarding and successfully taking over ships (which is harder than it looks, I have trooper perks) provides a lot more income than general freelance missions. The Map, which is bloody enormous, has a chance every few minutes or so to pop up a fair few freelance missions for you to accept and travel to. Freelance missions give a decent amount of money, which is based on the area level you’re in, so a high level dangerous area will give you more money than the starting area. They still however don’t quite give as much money as boarding ships, so many people have resorted to that instead. In terms of map area level, refer to the image below to help you out in your freeroaming travels.

Level Map.png


There really are so many features to talk about, I couldn’t describe them all within a week, and the devs have an enormous list to make this a true 4X space simulation experience to add on to these.

· Galaxy-wide bounty hunting

· Mercenary employing

· Ship boarding and capturing

· Mining

· Trading

· Pirating

· Smuggling

· Assassination

· Full reputation system with many factions

· Too many weapons to count and upgrade, including heavy weapons

· Full ship colour customisation

· Multiple ways to control your ship

· Shipping (express delivery!)

· Station repairing

· Ship salvaging

· Secret Blueprints

· Licenses (for income)

· Officers (provide passive bonuses)



· Finance system

· 3 different way to travel through space

· Full level up system to level 80

· Fleet mechanics (Not yet implemented, but seriously exciting)

· Upgradable ship systems

· Systems hacking (works both ways, got my bank hacked)

· Dynamic world

· Anomaly and other Science

· Legal system (Police took my space weed)

The list goes on, but there’s so much to remember it’s impossible. There really is a great deal of things to do. One of the many other things left to implement are full fleet mechanics, as well as the ability to outright destroy enemy (and friendly) stations and outfits like mining facilities. That’s not to stop you warping in in your carrier with 3 squadrons of Boson Bombers and wiping out every ship that warps in to defend it.



There are undoubtedly bugs, the game was only just released, and the developers add new content almost every week, so it’s something to bear in mind. I’ve also found that travelling across the map takes quite some time if you don’t use warp gates, and that got a little bit boring. The map is genuinely massive; I couldn’t tell you how long it would take to fly at full burnout speed to reach one end.

Controls

The controls are extremely snappy, there’s full controller support, but keyboard is ideal, as there’s plenty of hotkeys to melt your mind with. It’s not quite flight manual territory like X games, but there are a few very useful things you may want to memorise. There are a few ways to control your ship for example, and the + and – keys allow you to capitalise on different views and control methods. First and foremost is the mouse-led movement, which is great for ships with only forward facing guns. Most end game ships have about 6-8 guns with maybe up to 4 turrets on each gun mount, facing just about everywhere you can imagine your ship will shoot, so I used the mouse-led aim for my first Destroyer class ship.


You can see combat can occasionally get a little bit tense. I had just picked up my first combat style frigate and upgrading all of its systems for battle. I almost died, and occasionally kept getting sucked into the riftways and pulled away from battle. Once you move onto Frigates and Cruisers, you can either use WASDQE movement, or mouse-drag movement. Holding left click and dragging the mouse allows the ship to turn in that direction. On top of this, there’s turret mode, where the camera faces one way until moved with left click-dragging, and the ship is controlled with WASDQE. This allows some old fashioned ship type battles between two Battleships, firing at each other’s side with slightly more technological cannons. The “fire at will” command is pretty useful if you’re fighting singular tiny destroyer ships, as the mouse aim is difficult and the enemy has to be led into your fire similar to Freelancer. However “fire at will” does not focus fire, rather the turrets will aim at their own individual optimal target. Bit of a pain, but I think it balances the game somewhat.

Video Settings

There are plenty of options in the game, with a nice feature of options. I enabled all of them at first for the benchmarking, but the camera shake and motion blur was a little bit too strong for me, and only served to make me believe I needed glasses, it was that blurry. The game is immensely gorgeous, and is built on the Whale2 engine. Once you get a glimpse of the Twin stars, and see some of the various backdrops of space behind the hues of gas mining fields, you get a real sense of deepness of space. Honestly, I would want to do the game some real justice by maxing out all the eye candy that I could. Most weapons look pretty damn shiny in action, and the ship design from all the factions are quite unique in style. I could have stared at the Paladin and Tzar all day, they really do look immense and bring fear to your enemies! Some of them actually ran away shortly after warping in to ambush me in the Tzar. None survived.

Video 1.jpg

Video 2.jpg


System Performance

CPU: i5 4670 (Stock)
GPU: MSI GTX 970 (Stock)
RAM: 16GB 2133mhz
Storage: WD 1TB 7200RPM
Display: 2560 x 1440

The game runs quite well, with minimum FPS very occasionally dropping down for a frame or two. Most of the game I was sat comfortably around 50 or so FPS, only when I got into a pretty intense battle against the Empire capital ships did it plunge down towards the 40 FPS area. It looks incredibly shiny, however I can’t help but think that other games have quite a lot more eye candy and run similarly. I can’t help but wonder what aspect of this causes the frames to dip quite so low, though the game is supported by NVidia PhyX, so it’s possible that may cause some issues for some people.

I was largely looking at 90% used on the GPU, though it dipped a fair amount to very low figures in menus, bringing the average usage down a tad. The figures clearly show however, it is very much a GPU orientated game, with CPU loads spiking to highs of around 29-30%

1440p



1080p




Conclusion

Starpoint Gemini II is truly a beautiful game. Undoubtedly other games like Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous have massively better graphics, but Starpoint Gemini has a price that reflects its lower budget development. It crams in a huge amount of features, and the devs are incredibly keen and constantly adding more. The devs are also freely available to put questions to on their forum, and regularly answer player issues directly with the players on the forum. They also take a lot of feedback and add it to their wishlist for future implementation. They’ve done an incredible job so far, and the game has really come a long way since Early Access.

There are obvious balance issues, and the freelance missions can become a little boring due to the similar nature of every one, causing players to turn to pirating and stealing other ships, due to rewards. There’s a little bit of endgame for players who reach level 80 and have a full Carrier class ship and fully upgraded weapons, with bounty hunting and adjusting reputation, but due to the lack of true 4X implementation, the endgame becomes quite boring. There comes a point where you either leave the game and start again, or simply come back when more of the content has been added. That’s not to say you don’t get a few hours of enjoyment, warping into Empire space and launching squadrons of bombers and pulverising any enemy that dares to warp in to defend their territory. The campaign is something there for players who feel the need to continue the original story, but the writing and acting isn't that great, but on a whole the campaign is OK. Nothing more.

For those who enjoyed Evechron Mercenary, X games, Freelancer, and are still waiting on Elite and Star Citizen, Starpoint Gemini II is undoubtedly going on some to-do lists. I was a big fan of Freelancer, but never had the patience for X3 or Evechron, but somehow despite the lack of a proper tutorial when I started, and the huge open and 3 dimensional map, the game kept me going for 26 hours of pure freeroaming.


See the previous review of Styx: Master of Shadows




 
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Man, you're putting a lot of work into these reviews. This may sound trivial but I like how you put in the min FPS.
 
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Man, you're putting a lot of work into these reviews. This may sound trivial but I like how you put in the min FPS.

Taking a break until Sunday, spent pretty much every minute of spare time since Monday getting both of these ready.

As always good and especially bad feedback is much appreciated. Would also like to hear game requests!
 

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Nice. I have to admit, after the video, I may be tempted... (although the mention of the word "Freelancer" probably would have been enough). I do think we're getting spoiled looking at the vid play of Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, but some of the lesser graphic games still have a lot of promise and punch.. Thanks, 'Coon.
 
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Now I want to check out the game! :p Only point I am not quite clear on is the resolution. Is this 1080p or 1440p? I see 1440p in the menu, so I'd assume that but I want to be 100% sure. If that is the performance on 1080p with a 970 then an upgrade is looking more important for me. :p

Love the review though, keep it up!
 
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It's 1440p but I'll be redoing the benchmarks this weekend for better accuracy, and I'll also be doing 1080p results too to reflect the more common resolution among members. Keep your eye out Sunday for changes to the charts.
 
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Thanks for the 1080p. Looks like it is very CPU bottlenecked, I honestly expected that. Maybe my 7970 won't be crushed. :p
 
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Thanks for the 1080p. Looks like it is very CPU bottlenecked, I honestly expected that. Maybe my 7970 won't be crushed. :p

I do very much get the impression that the Whale2 engine is incapable of using more than 1 core of a CPU, definitely something to consider.
 
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bought it based off of ur review.. keeps crashing on my laptop but it may just be a heat issue with where I've been using it.

Feels like a dumbed down x3:ap
 
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Feels like a dumbed down x3:ap

Close enough. The devs wanted a Freelancer like game, with the opportunity to base it on a formula like X3. Sure it doesn't have the entering of the station or the fast forward of time while in jump speed. But that's not necessarily good features left out. I think it just appeals to a crowd that wants to play X but doesn't have the time or patience to learn each individual control scheme. I found X quite complicated, although I had and played X2 and X3 and had an entire empire. From what I can tell from talking to the devs (who will literally talk to everyone, and are quite open about further features), they are looking to make it more of an empire building universe. We already have early implementation of fleet mechanics and licenses for income per month (sort of like investment I suppose), so I fully expect the game to borrow heavily from the X featureset, only without mass intricacies like landing on a station. Some may want those things, some might not.

I will note to you though, personally, for the first hour I considered giving up. The game starts off with some kind of wall where you have no idea what you're doing and it just feels like you can't do much. Either power through it for an hour, OR play the campaigns first few missions with the terrible dialogue and storyline. It can teach you quite a bit.
 
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O I'm enjoying it so far. It keeps ctd'ing but I believe it's because im playing on a non heat friendly surface with my laptop because I'm stuck in a dorm room at my pre deployment site.

I always wanted to get into X3 but it was so damn complicated.
 

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Taking a break until Sunday, spent pretty much every minute of spare time since Monday getting both of these ready.

I was just about to ask how in hell you make the time to write these things.

Anyway, this is another game I actually want to try. A dumbed down X is almost exactly what I want. What I want exactly is to go back to 2003 and have Freelancer unplayed.

I really, REALLY wish there was a demo avaliable. :(
 
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I was just about to ask how in hell you make the time to write these things.

Anyway, this is another game I actually want to try. A dumbed down X is almost exactly what I want. What I want exactly is to go back to 2003 and have Freelancer unplayed.

I work from 7:30AM to 4PM at work, and then work from 4:30PM to about 9PM writing these, most of which is spent doing benchmarks and working on excel doing percentiles. Keeps me busy, and stops me from spending too much time getting demoralised playing LoL.
 
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