Starpoint Gemini (PC)

[Sir T]

Anyone that has played the Starfleet Command games will be in familiar territory on this one. Its basically so far a mix between that game and freelancer, with a dash of Eve Online. You wander around on your spacecraft doing missions and upgrading as you go. The graphics are basic, the music is really nice and atmospheric, and the graphics are pretty much what you would expect from an Indie developer.

Combat is basicly selecting what guns you have active at any one time and firing them while trying to get a decent shield in arc to avoid his fire. You can buy anything up to dreadnaught class, but the ship you are given at the start is well below par and you have to do some fairly boring mining and exploration missions before getting to the pew pew. Once you are there though its pretty fun with some decent effects going on and quick on the fly decisions about power allocation and what systems to repair up.

This is definably worth a look so far for someone with a hankering for some spacy pew pew and trading.

Buy from http://www.gamersgate.com/DD-SPG/starpoint-gemini

http://www.starpointgemini.com/

Be sure to get the patch from the game site as it fixes some showstoppers.

[bhodi]

Really? Buy it? at $30?

I checked out some youtube videos and all the missions look incredibly generic and boring. Their 3 examples were 'salvaging' which consists of going up to an object, targeting, and hitting the scan button, mining, which is the same but the button is labeled 'mine', and repairing which... well, you can probably guess.  Beyond starfleet command-esque combat, what else does this game have to offer?

[Sir T]

Played a bit more of it last night and to be honest not a great deal. The biggest problem is they have the same guy doing 75% of the voice acting, which rapidly gets very very annoying as he is Mr dull with foreign accent. It has the fun factor going for it, and I always like to support indie games developers, but when you compare it with something made by another indie dev like Evochron Mercenery (great game btw) it looks pretty dull.

But yeah, it is fun to play and all but the missions are pretty damn generic so if you are looking for breathtaking originality stay away. If they halved the price I'd say definatly buy it.

But lets face it, what other spacy games have come out lately.

[SpaceAchilles]

The Starpoint Gemini demo is out now; includes the introduction and first two campaign missions..

http://www.gamershell.com/download_71644.shtml