This review was first published in E13, September 1994.
Every so often you come across a game that, although primitive, is so intriguing that you find yourself playing it for hours on end, ignoring activities like eating and sleeping which suddenly assume a secondary importance. Star Control II is such a game. It’s not brilliant, but it is addictive, as anyone who has played it will testify.
The attraction of Star Control II is not immediately apparent, though. A conversion of a mature PC game, it features garish and unsophisticated sprite-based graphics that invite comparisons with 8bit games. However, in terms of cosmetics, the decidedly dated visuals are compensated for by the game’s wide range of bizarre sounds, toe-tapping tunes, and idiosyncratic characters.
Now, that’s a game cover.
But the appeal of Star Control II can be attributed mainly to its distinctive blend of space strategy, trading, negotiating, fighting and exploring. After a protracted war, the Earth has been enslaved by aliens and you have to liberate it, searching the galaxy for friendly alien species and scouring planets for minerals, life forms and energy sources to augment your Earth-based supplies.
When your stocks are sufficient and you’ve attracted enough allies, you can go to war with the Earth’s oppressors. The concept isn’t exactly original, but Star Control II offers the perfect balance between freedom to explore and a linear, objective-based scenario.
Star Control II’s combat is fast and lethal.
Star Control II is a methodical type of game that takes a long time to complete and never provides much in the way of adrenaline-surging excitement. Frankly, anyone who prefers action games will probably find it tedious. But there’s so much variety here that it’s hard to resist the temptation to continue playing, just in case you discover something new.
The problem with Star Control II is that it’s not really a 3DO title. The gameplay may be absorbing, but it quite obviously fails to take advantage of the 3DO’s potent hardware. Crystal Dynamics has always been an important catalyst for 3DO, but Star Control II is little more than a makeweight for the company’s summer release schedule.
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