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Sid Meier's Starships - It doesn't suck on PC

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Apparently a surprisingly large number of fans were expecting to get a deep game like a Civ or a spacegoing Pirates! for $16 on a short development cycle; they also apparently did  not even look at the gameplay footage that's been available for weeks.

Going in with my eyes open, though, I have little to complain about in the gameplay itself. It's pretty much what the video promised. The tie-in with Beyond Earth, modulo the bugs I'm about to mention, is no clumsier than I expected. The requirement to set up a 2K account to get the tie-in is not yet onerous - we'll see where that goes, and hope that it's not like EA's player abuse system.

Where the game totally fails, though is that despite being developed in parallel, and despite Firaxis' experience with PC games, it comes across as a crappy iPad port. Most of these things are inexcusable, showing either or both of a lack of testing on the PC or a lack of caring about PC quality:

  • It only plays in "full-screen windowed" mode. No true fullscreen, no choice of resolution. 2K's claimed "fix" for this is an ugly workaround telling you to change your desktop settings to hide the taskbar. Ugh for Firaxis and FY2 to 2K.
  • It crashes on exit, every time. Most of the time it crashes when you hit "exit" from the main menu, but last night I had it crash when I clicked "return to main menu" from the victory screen. Did they even test the PC version?
  • It has about a minute of unskppable video at game end. This doesn't feel like a victory celebration, it feels like punishment for winning. Ugh.
  • Right-click is treated exactly the same as left-click, even though a hover brings up a radial menu. Totally lazy.
  • Probably related to the crashes, the unlocks for Beyond Earth for playing Starships don't work. The unlocks in the other direction do, at least.
Despite all of these issues, it is a fun little game, especially if you have Beyond Earth and either you're not tired of it yet or you use the in-game-editor mod to fast-path you to the unlocks.

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