Boldly go to the exact same places – does this enterprising game evoke the wrath of feeling conned?
“Captain’s Log. Star date… didn’t go very well. She and I just had nothing in common. Anyway, we’re on a mission to seek out new life and new civilization, hang on. We’ve found it all. Never mind.”
Star Command is a tale of caution. It started as an ambitious Kickstarter project that promised an epic game of space exploration, with customizable ships and crew to match the way you wanted to approach the galaxy: as diplomat, researcher or fighter. But it hit snags, running into financial issues and delays, before running a second Kickstarter a year after the first. The eventual result feels light years away from the game that was promised and feels painfully short.
It’s a game that puts you in charge of your own spaceship, where you’ll manage the crew and its systems on your much-shorter-than-five-year mission. You view your ship from an angled, isometric view, and simply tap to control its various parts: touch crewmembers and then tap a spot to move them there; tap rooms to build new facilities or upgrade those you already have. As you journey around the galaxy, you’ll pick up ‘tokens’, which let you build and upgrade rooms, and recruit new crewmembers. At first, you’ll be limited to a skeleton crew and just a few rooms, but soon you’ll be looking over a hive of activity and technology. Sadly, what you fill your ship out with turns out to be rather regimented; there are exactly three types of small room for the three non- weapon slots on the larger ships, for example, so there’s a lack of real choice or customization.
Crewmembers are slightly more interesting, with each one leveling up individually, gaining new skills. You assign crew to a security, science or engineering role, and must balance the fact that crew are needed in rooms to make them function (so, you can’t use your weapons without someone manning them), while using your space peons to perform more general roles on the ship: redshirts kill intruders, scientists heal other crewmembers in battles and engineers perform repairs.
Star Command is essentially a series of battles; cutscenes tell you where to go next, and upon arriving, you’ll inevitably be caught up in a fight. There’s very little variety in these skirmishes,
though: fire when your weapons are charged, dodge incoming fire when you’re able, and you’ll be boarded if your shields go down. The battles are chaotic too, with everything happening in real time, so you’re trying to organize your crew to repel boarders while also keeping an eye on your weapons and shields. This makes for some incredibly satisfying and furious fights, but with every crewmember controlled individually through overly precise taps, actually responding to what’s happening is like herding lobotomized cats.
Following the story will let you build your ship’s capabilities for two or three hours, before taking you to a series of tense battles that do a good job of feeling like a race against time – and then it ends. The first time, we thought we’d just reached the end of a tutorial, and expected to be let loose on a lovely big galaxy. But we weren’t. You can continue in your ship, but only replaying missions, or you can opt to play the same story over in a new ship (though making different choices will tweak parts of it), but there’s a distinct feeling of ‘Is that it?’ With just two solar systems to see, Star Command simply feels too short to be called ‘exploration’.
This will scratch an itch for those who want a fun space romp -especially with the humor and irreverence in both the writing and the pixel art style (making it more like Galaxy Quest than Star Trek). There’s enough solid gameplay to lure you in, but it’s shallower than one of Kirk’s many trysts.
Verdict:
Make it so-so. Star Command has some great ideas, but it’s more of a sprint than a trek.