Buy Starpoint Gemini

Hmm. I was expecting this to play a lot more like Freelancer. In reality it's a lot like Starfleet Command. Take the control scheme from Starfleet, put it into the game world of Freelancer, take away the third dimension, and you've got Starpoint Gemini. Not terribly impressed. Not bad, but not at all what I thought it would be.

The controls are fairly intuitive, but not very useable. There's too much clicking and not enough hotkeys. This game would be great on a touchscreen, but I don't have one. So I'm stuck with a mouse and I need to click to do just about anything. And forget about the tutorial. BORING!!! Yes, it's nice that there IS a tutorial, but it's so slow and so LONG that I didn't bother getting very far into it.

I don't know what's so hard to understand about "in-game tutorial." It's the only way to go. Don't put me in the kiddie pool and show me how to use the mouse. I understand "click anywhere to set a course." Don't spend five minutes telling me that, and don't make me wait through pointless dialogue before you let me actually do it. Throw me in the deep end and explain things along the way. Just start the game already and spend FIVE MINUTES going over the broad strokes (click to set a course, right-click to target, click here to dock, etc). When something new comes up, tell me how to do it with a concise pop-up message and a blinky that says "CLICK HERE TO FIRE YOUR WEAPONS."

So... meh. I don't recommend it. It's a new mash-up of two classic genres that just kinda falls flat because of (a) the tutorial and (b) the mouse-dependent control scheme. Maybe I'll feel different after I play it on my laptop (with the touchscreen), but it seems to me this game is too old to properly support a touchscreen.

Starpoint Gemini is an open-world tactical space combat simulator. Emerging from a space-time stasis, you're a soldier trying to make your place in the Gemini System that has changed beyond recongition since its isolation at the end of the war you were originally part of.

Pros: The Gemini System is vaste, with dozens of sectors, each with their own space stations, factions and secrets. You're allowed to roam freely, at your own risk, which is great for for anyone who like exploring. You get access to dozens of ships and hundreds of ship components as you rank up your status through experience and standing with the numerous factions. You can freelance your skills, board or capture other ships to upgrade your own.

Cons: You have little direct control over your actions, as you command a ship, not a craft. You ask it to fire on enemy ship, you don't actually get to aim and shoot. The universe is flat, you cannot manoeuver over and under and beyond other ships, so you must circle around them in this 2D fashion, giving you little combat strategy. The game is far from polished and the graphics are showing their age. Voice acting is extremely amateurish with bad recording quality, speaking traditional technobabble in a failed attempt to give this sci-fi world credibility.

Verdict: I'm afraid I can't recommand this game. It is sub-par on so many aspects and an overall desappointment. If this is really type of game you like, look at other games or maybe invest a few extra bucks to get the sequel (in which I hope the developers learned what works and what doesn't), but I don't see any reason to recommand anyone to purchase Starpoint Gemini.

it may be old, may have its problems sure. but its still fun.

Don't be turned off so quickly by all of the other bad reviews – I would say that some of these people are stuck on "beauty is skin deep." I can agree with the other reviewers in some aspects; if you have big standards for shiny polish on games, you might want to avoid this one. The graphics are dated, the controls take some getting used to (I keep having to look at the configuration to figure out what I pressed by accident, even after 15 hours). There are bugs and CTD's. You can’t dock with T-gates sometimes or steer. The camera gets stuck at odd angles on occasion and you have to change sectors to fix it. The music selection leaves a bit to be desired. The radio chatter is repeatable.

One guy complained the tutorial was too long! I found it was just right for the complexity of the game and it got the basics down quite quickly. You just have to wait patiently for them to read all the text on the screen out (there is no “click to skip”). As for graphics, the sector backdrops are a bit washed out for my liking, I love the colorful and crisp sector graphics in X3. The music, though quite good, has a very limited number of tracks and is quite repeatable.

HOWEVER, this game has engaged me happily for over 20 hours now, and I’m only halfway through the campaign with very little extra exploration. The campaign can be challenging at some times, but I found it was a bit too easy to make money and afford a dreadnaught. It seems you need to do this in order to make good progress in the campaign. At one stage in the campaign you lose your ship, however you keep all of your equipment and cash. No problem, at that time I had enough to buy three new dreadnaughts. So yes, the campaign is a bit out of balance sometimes.

In the campaign, there is a lot of "fly to this sector, blow up this ship, then fly to that sector." But it's all wrapped up in a package that keeps it enjoyable, as you search for derelict ships to loot, Rogue containers to crack open and steal goodies from, and fight off pirates that randomly attack you. You can speed up monotonous travel by getting a T-Drive, but then you miss out a lot of the sightseeing opportunities along the way, and also chances to dock at stations to find better equipment than what you already have.

If you are excited by the prospect of boarding and capturing ships, this game does it nicely! If you love to customize ship equipment (weapon slots, shield slots, engine slots), you'll enjoy this game. If you want to play with over 50 different ships, each having different special abilities, you'll enjoy this game. If you like RPG-style characters, where you can focus on specific weapon types (beam vs. plasma) and improve your skills as you level up, you'll enjoy this game. You can even hire different officers, each which will add to your perks or boost one or more of your ship stats. The game gives you the possibility to line up your stats and perks to make an ultra-powerful beam-equipped ship destroys everything easily, until you hit an enemy who has shields and equipment specifically set up to resist beam weapons. Then you’re screwed. What fun!!!

The game has many aspects familiar to Freelancer - faction names and how they're handled, station names, station designs, radio chatter, jump gates. It also shares common control mechanisms with Eve Online, including 2D controls, ship configurations and character skill leveling. I wouldn't call it a "rip off" of any other game; rather it combines many of the great elements from other games, while setting up a solid new story and universe to enjoy them in. It's all tied together quite well in an engaging way, and I am continuously reminded of fond times I had playing Freelancer and Eve in years past.

I have been looking awhile now for a good new space game to enjoy. After playing SG1, I am even more excited now for the release of SG2. Well done, Little Green Men!

Got this game with the early access of the second one and i have to say I cant believe i missed this one! ok the voice acting is pretty basic and its a bit old now but if you want a game where you can have epic battles like sins well this is it! I love it because its different! ive played many space sims but this one is a gem! best way to put this game is a cross between star trek and sins.

I really can't recommend Starpoint Gemini. This was Iceberg's first game, and I'm afraid it shows. I can see what they were going for, but it just doesn't come together in a satisfying way. Presentation-wise, the game manages to look dated (ship models) and beautiful (nebulas and planet vistas) at the same time. I can live with that. I could't live with the voice acting though, which I'm sure must be done by the dev team, or someone they kidnapped off the street. Fortunately for the sake of your sanity you can turn this off. More worrying though is the UI, which is confused, overly complicated, and a royal pain in the ♥♥♥. Even basics such as turning your ship aren't handled well: you can either left click to turn the ship towards the point you clicked, which is useless for anything to the side or behind you, or you can hit the A and D keys which turn the ship in what seem like 30 degree increments per press, with multiple presses resulting in prolonged spinning until the key presses wear off. It's manageable once you get used to it, but it's painful and makes combat a drag. That's a pity because the combat engine is fun at first, it's nicely tactical and lasers sizzle and whump appropriately, but I found it soon became frustrating due mainly to the very high early difficulty; your ship only has a narrow firing arc, everything else it seems can out-turn you, so lining up to take a shot means your front shields are quickly toasted with you being barbequed shortly afterwards.

The other problem is that the living universe is merciless, and high level rogue (pirate) ships crash your nice low-level party with frustrating regularity. I had to replay the first mission about four times because I kept getting jumped by high level pirates that laid waste to everyone including my puny level 1 ship. It's a pity the quicksave button doesn't work, because you have to save a lot... except it doesn't actually let you save during the prolonged and tedious dialogs and during mission events. Eventually you start to get a handle on things, and there were moments such as the first time I flew inside a nebula that the game almost starts to sing, but then it's gone. Side-missions from stations largely involve flying to a point and clicking a couple of icons, or flying to a rogue ship and getting blasted within seconds. After a few hours I realised that I just wasn't having any fun because I'd played this game before in much better forms. However, the silver lining is Starpoint Gemini 2, which is apparently so massively better as to be a completely different game. I'd start there if I were you.

Starpoint Gemini is a very good game in many ways. The missions are great and test your skills almost to a point of frustration (Save often). After each mission you are given free play untill you reach a certain level at which time the next mission begins, this free play time is to make money and upgrade your ship, weapons and shields, use it to your advantage and the missions are a little easier, squander them or rush to advance makes life tough.

Downsides are the game is based on an unrealistic 2 planes (no up or down) and the frequent crashes when jumping to new systems (game autosaves at each jumpgate so when it crashes you restart at the gate you crashed at). There are other little downsides in the game, like slow docking, random attacks that you can't win (again, save often) and systems that don't load right in the missions (not often) that makes you reload to continue.

Although this game is a little weak on realistic space flight it is a very engaging game that I find myself playing for hours on end and seldom tire of. It has it's quirks as any game does and if you ever played a game called Freelancer this game would be a distant second, but I love to play it and would recommend it to anyone who loves open universe space epics. Great missions and storyline mixed with great free play make this one a must have.

Remember to save up a ton of money - or sell your ship - before you're called in to do a certain space station defense story mission. Otherwise, you'll end up destroying all the enemies just because you can -> Proceed to complete the mission -> then watch as your ship gets blown up because there were "too many enemies" and someone had to stay behind as bait for the evacuation.

Huh? Didn't you blow them all up?

On the very next mission, you end up in a weaponless shuttle with no afterburners and paper-thin shields. Your mission? Infiltrate a heavily guarded military compound deep in the heart of enemy territory. Wow, lo and behold, the alarm trips while you're right in the middle and you have to escape.

Not...happening. In a fit a frustration, on the 5th restart or so, I broke story and used the money I had left to purchase a ship with weapons, loaded it with the best gizmos for its class (jump drive and afterburners not optional), and proceeded to barely survive that mission.

This game has that and more plot holes. Mainly, whoever had designed the game continually assumes you're still piloting that dinky starting freighter instead of working your ♥♥♥ off to buy a class 10 dreadnought with the latest upgrades.

That wasn't all that pissed me off, this game took a page from Freelancer and added radio chatter. However, if you listen closely to the radio chatter, it ends up being one of three things. Something about law enforcement are all pigs. Some guy being interdicted and scanned. And something else. Wow, I'm happy that I'm finally forgetting what they were saying. After listening to the inane chatter for the several hours that I played the game, you'd think it'd have sunk in more. Ah, but wait till you get into battle. Then you're treated to a hostile cacophony and some small schmuck in the background threatening to kill you. No, seriously. It's like you're in a noisy nightclub and there's some guy with the band singing an accompaniment of death threats at odd times.

And don't even get me started on getting killed at the very beginning because my level 1 ship can't stand up to a level 20 pirate. Actually, I thought that was interesting. Never mind.

Still, I think the game has far too many stupid issues to be recommendable.

Starpoint Gemini feels.... uncompleted somehow. The voice acting is bad (amateur level voice acting).. Controls are dorky. The game is just... feeling off.

Can't really recommend it... Pick up another game space sim (Recommend Galaxy on Fire 2, I don't own that many space sim but its better in almost every aspect).

This is just bad. The controls are clunky, the voice acting is terrible, and man-o-man the graphics. For a game that came out in 2011 it looks like it would have been right at home on a CompUSA shelf in 1998.

If you're looking for a space sim go for X3 if you want single player (that came out 3 years before this but looks like it came out 20 years after it) or for the masochist's out there try EvE Online.

For the patient player willing to spend the time to work through the lengthy hour-long tutorial, Starpoint Gemini delivers a rich, polished space exploration freelancer experience. The game supports widescreen resolutions, the Steam Overlay, and is complimented by a relaxing musical score. Unfortunately, the graphics are inferior to other space titles such as X3, and the Russian accented narration is nearly unintelligible at points, this game is a solid edition to the genre. If you enjoy games like X3 or EVE online, you will probably find much to like in Starpoint Gemini.

SPG is far from a polished release. It has lots of little problems, copious disabling of the save function, clunky dialogue with a horrible translation, annoyingly repetitive and random voice overs, some horrible accents and voice acting, a simplistic ui with no customization that routinely conflicts with itself, dated graphics, few ease of life features like map waypoints/autopilot/market comparisons, labourious buying and selling procedure, you can only have one ship at any one point, tiny module inventory in each station, split functionality between the overview and radar map, balance which ensures the majority of the ships (ie the smaller ones) are redunant for the later game, HORRIBLE collision detection between your ship and asteroids (You will exclaim at some point during your playthrough "I was ♥♥♥♥ing miles from that asteroid!"), and there are probably other things I am forgetting.

However despite all this they still manage to craft an engaging experience. The plot is interesting, the world is large, combat and movement is simplified but not too simple and the missions have a bit of variety.

As the above paragraphs should attest, it's faults are many and varied and on the surface may seem to outweigh the positives but it somehow adds up to (mostly) fun. I am 32 hours in and still going strong.

I'd like to think people would come to my defense if someone said something untrue or false about me and after reading so many negative reviews and scores on this game, I wanted to, as a fan of the space sim genre and a gamer, come to the defense of this game but after 8 or so hours.......let me explain....
I really wanted to give this game a chance and I did try despite it's....flaws, however minor or major, which I will explain because I can't stand criticism without a reason.

I was having fun, once I learnt the ropes, which buttons do what, how missions work, how I make money, a very basic frame that works. There are missions from various space stations, you can mine rocks to sell the ore to stations, buy commodities low and sell high. Upgrade your ship or buy a completely new and more powerfull ship with better upgrade slots, hire officers for your ship wich give you certain abilities and basically do whatever the heck you like in an open world sandbox space sim.
The ideas themselves work, it's what you'd expect to find in this type of game.

Right, so where did I find it went wrong?

Generally the first thing a gamer notices is the graphics but that's only the most obvious thing and it doesn't make a game. With SPG it's in your face, very noticable that for a 2011/12 game, you'd expect a little more bells and whistles.

I have to say the thing I found most grating was the voice acting, I'm not sure if they were genuine accents or acting but in all honesty I HAD to read the subtitles because I couldn't understand a thing the actors were saying, let alone differentiate one from another.

The controll of the ship was jumpy, if you use the keyboard for turning there is a massive jump in direction, too sensitive. And if you use the mouse for control, particularly durning combat, it feels janky. Using the mouse you need to mouselook as well as turn to the direction of the enemy ship...very difficult. I found it a lot easier to use the mouse for looking and selecting during combat and the keyboard for turning.

BUT, for some reason the worst thing I encountered amongst a list of others, was the fact that you have so many skills that you could easily use and are quite helpfull...but only one action bar with 5 slots........I tried to reason with myself: " I don't need to use 10 or more skills do I?" But simply put, if anyone at all found more than 5 skills usefull, they have every right to damn well use them and be able to equip them on the quickbar. In actual fact, I found myself using active pause so I could swap out the 10 other skills I wanted to use....to much frustration!!!!

Games are supposed to be fun! And I did find this enjoyable but the negatives outweighed the posatives for me, the quickbar thing was for me the gamebreaker, the point where the enjoyment turned into the frustration. I did overlook the graphics, voice acting and overcame the quirkiness of the controll methods initially but if I can't use 6+ abilities on the fly or at will by clicking an icon on that hotbar then it's a game I'm unable to play at it's full potential.

One last word. Unfortunately also, there is very little on the web about SPG, no lets play vids no walkthroughs and not much or nothing on tactics or hints on how to play. I was hoping to go through the story of the game before I played SPG 2, which incedentally has so much more info and hype around it that it's predecessor and for good reason.

So at this stage, I can't recommend SPG.

Don't buy this. It is described as a space RPG/Simulation. I have never played an RPG where you go to choose your character, and there is just one choice. The arrows are there to pick something else, but every choice is Derp McStachio! It's like trying to change the channel away from Cake Wars, and every channel is showing the exact same episode of Cake Wars!

Also, the only way this game is a simulation is if it is trying to simulate a drunken man pretending he is a space ship. Dear god I have never had so much trouble trying to fly in a straight line. The screenshots are pretty?!

Starpoint Gemini is a very good "Space Trader" style game for first timers. There are a lot of the "Space Trader" games out there, and some can get a bit confusing as to how to handle the game. This game is a bit more simplified ina sense that, although the game is in 3D, space flight isn't. Not to imply that space flight games SHOULDN'T be 3D, but if you want simple, you can't get much simplier than this.

Starpoint Gemini allows you to play either in a campaign or play as if you were a freelance for hire. Campaign is pretty straight forward, complete missions to get to the end of a story. Endless mode (If you will) lets you do what you want without having to complete missions. As long as you are making money, you can do anything you want. Upgrade your ship, help space stations handle a few pesky space pirates, or even participate in a free for all battle to be able to win the best ship and equipment. Or, if you feeling lucky, maybe you want to take on the entire galazy and be the ruthless pirate and space crook there is, just kill everyone you meet.

Because flight is in 2D, it's simple to find where you are going and getting to where you need to go without having to be able to understand the concept of space flight in general. Also, getting from one location to another is also simple. Just follow the flight plan and follow which jump gates take you to any sector you want to go. A simple game for people who love space flight, but don't want an overly complicated game. Who knows, maybe once you learn to play this game, you might move up to Starpoint Gemini 2 or some more to your liking.

Dull missions, terrible combat, and horrible voice acting. There's no reason you could have to play this.

Pretty awful game with good intentions. SG screams underfunded, indy development but you can see what the devs were trying to achieve and hopefully, SG2 will be a lot better.

Starpoint Gemini could be a great space opera BUT: It's a 2-dimensional game playing in space! Who the hell thought of this gameplay? You can't fight well against your enemies with only two options (left or right). The loadtime of the weapons make this game a round based one. If you have ever played Freelancer, never touch this game at all. I only bought it, because it was on a sale... Never made it to play it for sure, just played the tutorial and like 3 minutes of the actual game.

For a 2012 game this is quite poor, graphically out-dated and the sound, espcially voice acting, is lack-lustre. It's a good thing this was a free game when puchasing Starpoint Gemini 2, albeit just to show the great advancement in the sequel where the potential is finally realised.

Wow. They have fixed most of the bugs. Now as to the first mission with the DLC (Timebreach) there is a way around the bug. You will lose your ship, but you can still dock with a station and purchase another one if you have credits saved. Ok you gotta fish around for parts, and it's inconvenient, but it's doable. As to the game, I've really enjoyed it so far, mission depth and some which make you think fast to just survive. They are all survivable though. Only thing I can't seem to find is a Cloak Officer for my Level 5 cloak for my Dreadnought. lol. I'll just have to dock at every single station I come across till I get one I guess. Anyway, it's been really enjoyable, and I recommend the game to others who like a space sim. The controls are a little tricky to get used to, but you do, eventually.