Star Command Galaxies

I remember playing and replaying the original over and over again. It was one of my favorite IOS games and still is to this day, despite it being a bit of a broken record of a game. I was excited by the little teaser the original game had at the end, about pirates and stuff, but was sad when it never came to fruition. Then one day recently, I was feeling nostalgic for the old Star Command when I discovered this on Steam and downloaded it right away. After playing through the whole game I have some thoughts, some good, some bad...

The Good:
It has the same lighthearted humorous dialog and story as the original. You can TELEPORT to other ships which you never could in the original. The different weapons are really cool and add great variety to your Tactical crew members. I didn't get to try out any of the different ship weapons but there are a lot more than 3 like in the original, and other new ship systems, like a health/energy stealing ray. I really like the inventory idea, with the ship being a big inventory to stash your weapons, scrap, and other treasure.

The Bad
It crashes. A lot. I once had to restart a single mission 7 or 8 times before I finally got lucky and didn't have the game die on me.

Its short, painfully so. There are 2-5 missions in each sector, but not enough variety in the missions. Also there are usually two branches that you can take, but I can't go back to another branch once I go down the other, which cuts the number down by at least 2 missions. They all seem random, which is good, but there's not enough variety. Something I really liked about the original is that you could go to any mission whenever you wanted. You didn't have to do all the missions, but if you wanted to have enough tokens to upgrade your ship, you would want to do them all, even if it was a hard mission and you might lose somebody. In Galaxies, I can skip some of the missions and actually be better for it. I almost always bribed the Pirates, or accepted their bribe, because the reward for fighting them was not worth it. Of course, if you do it too much, you can end up having 5 Rebel ships attack you at once, which was exciting and probably the most fun I had during the game. Trying not to die against 5 enemy ships boarding you while firing at you and stealing your energy made it quite stressful. Or I could just give them a bed and have them all leave me alone.

I was surprised to learn Galaxies has been in development almost since the original came out. For almost 10 years of development this seems like very little content, and for $15 it's probably not worth it. The original was $3 and I had countless hours of fun from that game, yet I can't see myself replaying this one at this point. There's just not enough there. I could have beat the game in maybe 5 hours if not for all the crashes, since you can only save at a space station, which you can only get to AFTER you have completed all the missions in a given area, so if the game crashes on the last mission, which it did, frequently, then you have to do all the previous missions over again, only to have it crash on the last mission. Again. (It's the 2nd to last one, the Rebel station. Something about my grenades or moving all the crew at once, or loading enemies or something caused it to crash over and over again).

There are 3 aspects of the original that I really like which are lacking in Galaxies.
1. Despite it being also very short, the original got harder every time you beat the game, making it fun and engaging to play again and again. There doesn't seem to be a difficulty setting in Galaxies, meaning this is impossible. It's the same game again and again.
2. The original had multiple aliens you could hire or get onto your crew. In Galaxies, I can only have humans, which are boring. I want Midorians, and Trilaxians, and Avains, and Antorians, and the new ones like the Octorons and the Teenage Mutant Ninja turtle dudes, God I want one of those!
3. The original had multiple different paths depending on the dialog you selected. Sometimes you would get a crew member of one alien race or a different one depending on the path you took. Sometimes you would rescue the princess, sometimes you would let the Ants have her and the Midorians would hate you for it. The little differences presented by the dialog options provided ample opportunity to for replayability, because if you're like me, then you want to know what each option does and how it affects the game. Galaxies does not have this and I was surprised by that, given that it is such an integral part of the original.

Ideas for improvement:
Weapons locker: Somewhere to stash your weapons so they aren't cluttering the floor would be great.

Crew Hit-box is slightly to large/tall. Many times I tried to select one guy and I would select the wrong one, even though I was clicking on the right guy. I ended up clicking on the portraits more often than not, and even then sometimes I would have to double click a crew member before the previous selection was cleared.

More missions/more game after I win. The story ends way too quickly. I want to hire aliens in my crew, I want a bigger ship with more crew, I want to interact with the Midorians and travel around with a fleet of battlecruisers and crush the rebel scum! I want to teleport onto alien planets and explore the galaxy! It sounds like the devs want to add more content, so please, DO IT! \

Also fix the crashes. Please, I'm begging you.

If you've made it this far I commend you! I want to be clear, I'm not hating on the devs. I WANT this game to be great and better than the original. And it definitely could. Star Command Galaxies has great potential, but needs a lot of work.

Would I recommend it? In its current state, no. It's not worth $15, maybe not even $5. But I WANT it to be. And I hope with this review, maybe this will help the devs take another step towards getting there.

I loved the iOS version and really wanted to like this, but it was just not fun. I waited for it to come out for years and it never recaptured the fun the iPad version had.

Just downloaded it yesterday! loved it! im a hugh fan of the mobile version!!! but this ine is REALLY AMAZING and excited for future updates, they have such an amazing job with this released. 100 worth it!!! being waiting fro this for years tbh

this feels like a mobile game with super weird pacing

STAR COMMAND GALAXIES

Extremely buggy and not worth any amount of money

I decided yeah why not, had the app years back in high-school decided to try the game. I literally ran into a bug thats blocking any further campaign progress. It won't let me return to the star-base and it won't let progress further into the map. I'm doomed to repeat the same cut-scene over and over. Yeah that's not cool, y'all really should've ironed out these bugs ages ago.

Wait on it a bit more. You have to restart the game for settings to actually update and Scenes/Levels will load with various bugs (including disowning your ship from you if it spawns over the intended 'level' as a softlock) that will lose you several levels of progress and rng rewards.

I feel old while waiting for this game

Game is unpolished and still has many bugs - some bugs make the game completely unplayable. The price can be warranted as game becomes more polished and the bugs get squashed - for now however, I would suggest waiting for several bug fixes.

It causes my laptop to overheat and shut down after about 3 minutes. It is truly remarkable that a modern "retro" game is able to be so incredibly inefficient.

This game is a mixture of fun and pain.

pros:
Star Trek feeling
nice pixelgraphics
nice animations
nice sound, nice audio
nice humor
cool items
good game mechanics
tactical decicions, nice combat
customization (ship inventory, crew- and shipname)
good difficulty, not to easy and not too hard
pretty fun
no game-crashes so far

cons:
this game is not finished, feels like early access, at best
lots of bugs, you can play the game but be aware to encounter a lot of strange things like stuff not working, UI randomly missing items, buttons not accessible, UI not scaling correctly, wrong sprites showing up or sprites missing, people walking backwards, aliens hard to interact, lots of path finding issues and stupid behavior, quest triggers not working correctly, items not accessible, ...
controls are terrible, It takes some time to get how it works
a lot of things doesn't make sense, useless unfinished game mechanics, inconsistencies etc.
a story campain but thats it, lack of content after story is finished, lack of balancing

This game is for you If you are a captain that like stupid challenges, commanding (and babysit) a crew of idiots, going on adventures, encountering wtfs, solving other poeples problems, killing and robbing space aliens, collecting lots of trash that piles up in your ship, not being afraid of some pain and frustration, being prepared of allies attacking each other, blowing up ships and having some fun.

This game is not for you if you want a fully developed game. There are way better space management games out there.

This game costs 13 bugs, for this money you get a game with more than 13 bugs, but 13h of playtime too
I recomment waiting for a discount or until the game is more finished and bugfixed.
I like this game but I cannot recommend it in its current state.

This game still feels unfinished. Mobile version is preferable to this, even with it lacking the features of this version. This game feels like a scam especially to those who have been around since the Kickstarter days. If you are looking for a spaceship management game where your crew can get up to outer space shenanigans buy Space Haven instead. It is actually polished and has many more features despite the fact it is still in early access. I am convinced nobody would prefer this game unless they are specifically looking for a 1:1 Start Trek parody, in which case they should probably just get the mobile Star Command game. It actually felt polished and meant to be played. Would refund if I didn't purchase it ages ago like a tool.

Very Promising game, really fun concept - Almost like Sims in Space. It has a really nice retro feel and design.

At this stage, it still is struggling with a few bugs and glitches which can be frustrating. I'm optimistic about what the devs are working on, and hopefully the game will be in a much stabler place soon!

Okay, changing my review to recomend.

Having went past the first two missions the crashes stopped and game became what its supposed to be. Completed the story and and loved every second of it. The game surely needs some polish, but its potential is enormous.
Also learned that 1.5 people were working on i on their free time. And with that - this game is a tremendous achievement as is already.

Hopefully the sales will allow to bump the team to at least 10 fulltime devs - then it may become what it's authors envision it to be in meaningful time. And it and the authors surely deserve it.

I still vividly remember tracking the release of the original Star Command on IOS when I was a kid, and fondly recall finishing my first of a handful of playthroughs sitting through AP Bio as a high school freshman. The experience was more linear than I had hoped for, but the style was charming and the gameplay was novel for the time and platform. I was always a fan of FTL, and this scratched a similar itch while also being distinct enough to warrant its own existence. I was excited when Galaxies was first announced all those years ago, but it was in the oven for so long it simply slipped off the radar. I am now 4 years post *college* graduation, but seeing this product finally enter 'full release' means more to me than I thought it would. Its not perfect, but the passion for the project shines through and I can only hope Warballoon will continue to tweak and polish.

I only just finished the introductory order, and my thoughts are positive overall. I do agree with the criticisms regarding UI scaling and font readability, and I personally experienced some weird overlap issues with my ship and other ships that resulted in me being unable to properly navigate either and thus needed to restart that mission. It can also be finicky when you are trying to issue movement orders or select something on the ground and the game does the opposite. Pathing can be weird too. It is my understanding that this game is more procedural in nature, so stuff like that is bound to happen I suppose. Being able to save mid-mission, rather than only between excursions at a station would help these soft-lock issues.

Even if you disregard my personal sentimentality towards this project I believe the experience is more than worth the cost of entry, and I hope the game gets enough attention to justify continued development. I suspect some features fell by the wayside over the years, such as planetary deployments, but maybe things can get moving again if they get some momentum. Regardless, I am very happy to see this thing finally get out of the door and am looking forward to playing around with it some more when I can.

Wow. Finally 1.0, almost 10 years later

Too bad it is still complete unplayable hot garbage.
AI is dumb as a brick, doesn't listen to commands and doesn't attack enemies
UI is a mess, battles are boring
Random floor pixels of destroyed ships flying all over the place from one map to another
Bricked save after 2 hrs of playtime

Fuck that.