Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disastrous"

Like the other reviewer (geneo2036), I actually LIKE space sim games. Wing Commander, Privateer, Freelancer, Star Wolves -- I avoid the mindless shooty types (DarkStar, SpaceForce, etc).

Starpoint Gemini starts letting you down right off the bat with the tutorial. If you find the guy's speech too slow (since, you know, people can READ faster) and choose to skip, oops, you just skipped that step of the tutorial. Had to reload it and suffer through all the guy's voiced lines.

Camera is fixed. What. The. FSCK. Seriously. I'm not kidding you.

Docking animation not skippable. Now before you go yelling at me for such a "trivial" concern, take into account that your ship leisurely drifts towards the station at 5km/h, taking it's own sweet time, EVERY SINGLE TIME you dock. Easily a minute+ wasted each and every docking attempt.

Trading issues. Like the other guy said, you have to page between the buy/sell stuff, and combined with the fact that often windows can glitch and overlap each other, you're left staring at a jumble of text where they overlap. Try opening the ship menu before you dock and see what happens when you enter the station. Unacceptable.

Terrible voice acting. Yes, I understand talent costs money. But for god's sake, DO NOT use an automated text-to-speech script, EVER. Silence is preferable to suddenly hearing the grinding archaic synthetic voice that should've died in the 1980s when the first voice synths appeared. (Any other old timers recognise "Cubic 99", "spoken BASIC"? Yes, it's this bad.)

Overall low production values. Now, I'm not really one for presentation, as I can still somewhat accept Privateer-level graphics in this day and age (although the game should be goddamn good if it looks that bad in this year 2011). But the game just feels like an amateur effort all around.

-
Barely acceptable graphics; poor sound; bad voice acting; clumsy interface; none of the amenities that players have come to expect in this day and age like automatic journal/notekeeping, verbose quest log (I mean, come ON, these things should be MANDATORY in any kind of game where you play in some kind of persistent universe, not just RPGs).

I'm surprised it even got on here as there have been shareware titles in the past that are more polished than this game. It's not ENTIRELY bad, but it certainly isn't something I'd be happy to play, let alone consider my money at least well spent.