By introducing an entirely new and mysterious universe full of colorful, hilarious aliens and bringing back the intense arcadey space battles, Star Control: Origins gets about two thirds of the way toward recapturing the magic of Star Control 2, the revered 1992 adventure about forming an interstellar alliance against a greater threat. If it weren’t for the tedious chore of gathering resources from planets’ surfaces, it’d be a revival to celebrate.

As humanity takes its first step into the stars we find we’re not alone, and that many of our neighbors are delightfully stupid. There’s the pathetically needy Tywom banana slugs, the obsessively bureaucratic Measured, a sleazy race of con artists who’re basically Watto from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with longer necks, and plenty more – each stranger and more surprising than the last. All the major aliens have a distinct style and personality that’s brought to life by diverse character models and fun voice acting.

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The absurdist and occasionally laugh-out-loud humor of Star Control: Origins’ dialogue is its greatest asset, and it uses it effectively to cover up some of its deficiencies – there are various jokes about why every member of each alien race looks and sounds exactly like the others, for example. Listening to aliens casually discuss interstellar fish genocide or the proper number of ears to everyone should have is usually well worth taking the time. Dialogue could’ve used a bit more variety for common interactions, though: having every conversation with the malfunctioning starbase AI end with “EXCEPTION - CIVIL FAREWELL NOT FOUND!” and every rescue when you run out of fuel come at the cost of listening to the Tywom’s god-awful Star Trek fanfic gets old pretty quickly.

“ It's a reminder that Star Control: Origins is an adventure game, not an RPG.

Navigating the galaxy to chase your quest objectives can be a hassle sometimes because, unless you’re meticulously marking your map with the multi-colored marking tool, it can be a pain to find what you’re looking for. If you’re given a star system’s name you can search for it in the map screen easily enough, but if someone asks you to travel to another species’ homeworld without mentioning it by name you can’t just click on that race’s name on the map, even if you’ve been there before. Instead, you have to scroll through the detailed captain’s log screen until you find where they’ve specifically been mentioned, at which point you can click on the name to auto-pilot your way to them. I can certainly understand not wanting navigation to feel so automatic that you barely have to look at the map, but putting it behind this much annoying menu fiddling is a step too far.

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“ Star Control: Origins’ greatest sin is failing to learn the lessons of the original Mass Effect.

Star Control: Origins Screenshots 13 IMAGES

“ Space is where the real action is, and the punchy, top-down arcadey space combat is the most fun I had in Star Control: Origins.

It’s also frustrating that Star Control: Origins doesn’t keep track of which systems or planets you’ve already visited and stripped bare of resources (or passed over). Especially in the late game, it was aggravating to find that I’d already been to a system a few days earlier.Star Control: Origins’ greatest sin, though, is that it failed to learn the lessons of the original Mass Effect. Remember how just about everybody loved that game except for the parts where you had to drive the Mako landing vehicle around empty planets? Star Control: Origins is a lot like that, except that its annoying driving makes up a much greater percentage of your playtime.That in itself would be boring, but like the Mako before it, Star Control: Origins’ landing vehicle is cursed by bouncy physics. Anytime your landing vehicle runs up against an obstacle it’s anybody’s guess whether you’ll glide over it smoothly or bounce around wildly, potentially ending up facing 180 degrees from where you were intending to go. You can’t actually flip over and get stuck, at least, but the unpredictability of it never stopped being annoying.Other than that, the only thing to do on planets is combat, but it’s absolutely dismal. Most planets are uninhabited or populated with mostly docile wildlife that barely even reacts to being shot (a rhino-like animal will charge you if you don’t kill it quickly, but it’s kind of hard not to), and hunting them barely seems sporting. But fairly frequently you’ll find resource-rich worlds defended by utterly incompetent drones or turrets that are completely incapable of hitting a moving target unless it’s headed directly toward them. They can all be easily defeated by circle-strafing, but generally you can ignore them entirely and scoop up the resources they’re protecting as if they weren’t even there. That is, unless you manage to get your lander killed by one of the far more deadly natural hazards; then the drones might camp your landing site, destroying you instantly when you attempt to land again. And as far as I’ve seen there are only two weapons available for the lander, but neither is fun to use.Once I hit the point about two-thirds of the way through the story where money no longer seemed to matter as much because I was able to get all the resources I needed from running the story missions instead of landing on planets, things improved considerably. The story became much more interesting and expansive, and boss fights and new enemy types made space battles even more diverse and challenging.Like with Fleet Battles, in the campaign you can collect a fleet of ships to send into combat before you endanger your flagship (which must survive or it’s game over) but the vast majority of those I found felt pointless. If I was up against an inferior opponent it made the most sense to send in my much more powerful flagship to destroy it quickly; if I was facing a strong enemy, like a Scryve battlecruiser, the weaker ships in my fleet would be destroyed comically quickly with area-of-effect attacks and my flagship was the only one that stood a chance. It doesn’t help that Star Control: Origins doesn’t give you a view of the capabilities of your ships or your opponent’s ships at the moment you’re selecting which one to use, so it’s extremely easy to pick one that has no chance at all against the attacker.Though the ships are in general creatively designed, I found it weird that even though this is a game about bolting alien tech onto your human-built spacecraft to dramatically improve its speed, capacity, and combat abilities, the look of your flagship doesn’t change at all from start to finish no matter how many fancy engines and weapons you acquire. That’s especially bizarre considering that since this is a game that includes a highly customizable ship-builder tool for use in Fleet Battles that allows you piece together a custom craft from a healthy assortment of parts. When the technology is built in already, why would Stardock would completely miss this important, rewarding aspect of an action-RPG upgrade loop?