Review: ‘Sid Meier’s Starships’ is slick but struggles to fire its thrusters

[Buster's Uncle]

Review: ‘Sid Meier’s Starships’ is slick but struggles to fire its thrusters
Plugged In
By Gordon Cameron  3 hours ago



Artwork from Sid Meier's Starships. (Firaxis)



The word “starship” evokes grandeur, adventure, and infinite possibilities. Those also happen to be the calling cards of famed Civilization impresario Sid Meier, who most recently took to the heavens in the solid if unspectacular strategy game Civilization: Beyond Earth.

Meier’s latest takes gamers even further into the galaxy. Sid Meier’s Starships is an odd little game that’s spun off from Beyond Earth, but it's considerably more modest in its aspirations. It's also just not quite as fun.

Starships exists in a sort of twilight zone between two different genres. The game’s core focus is rather narrow: you control a single fleet of spacecraft as it zooms from one planet to another taking on various missions. With titles like “Duel at Dawn” and “Death Craft Alpha,” these bite-sized adventures are meant to evoke the episodic qualities of a classic Star Trek episode.

But there’s still a stripped-down Civilization strategy game going on in the background. If you succeed in a particular mission, you’ll gain influence with that system, the better to subsume it into your fledgling Galactic Federation. Your opponents, meanwhile, are expanding their own empires each turn.

Civilization veterans will be familiar with certain gameplay elements, like a diplomacy screen that features various leaders making passive-aggressive comments at one another. You even have a smidgen of control over the improvements, cities, and wonders within your empire. This section of Starships is broad in scope but too shallow for vets of the series. It’s a bit like playing Civilization with mittens on.

It's just an awkward blend, and I had trouble getting into the right head space for it. I wanted to focus on the adventures of my intrepid crew of interstellar explorers, but I had to keep one eye on the strategic business despite not having much control over my empire. It's all a bit frustrating. Am I really running this operation? If so, why can’t I build more fleets and send them off to do other things, as I would be able to do in any ‘real’ strategy game? If not, why provide so much distracting context?





Against this schizophrenic backdrop, you’ll play a series of tactical combat missions. Each time you take on an adventure in a new world, you’ll find yourself engaged in battle on a cartoonish, two-dimensional space map. You might have to blast some pirates into space dust, or escort a transport to a warp gate, or survive for a number of turns against a horde of enemies.

This tactical combat, which feels like the crunchy center of Starships, is designed to be slick, fast, and easy to pick up. There’s not a lot of depth. You don’t get to target enemy ships’ subsystems, your crewmembers have no independent existence, and there are only a few special mechanisms: torpedoes, launchable mini-fighters, and stealth.

To the designers’ credit, they’ve done a pretty good job striking the ‘easy to learn, tough to master’ balance, and the battles, each of which takes no more than 10 minutes to complete, grow mildly addictive. The torpedoes are especially fun; you launch them one turn and then detonate them the next, so you really need to have an idea of where your enemies are headed to succeed.

I just wish Starships was more…starshippy. 2012’s indie hit FTL showed how even the tiniest bit of crew customization, for example, could trigger effective emotional engagement. Why can’t I have crew members with their own little progression trees instead of just upgrading the ships as a whole? Why can’t the repetition of the tactical space battles be broken up with some terrestrial away-team action?

The answer, likely, is that the developers didn’t want to overcomplicate the design. And that’s generally a good instinct. But in this case, it leads to a game that winds up being overly repetitive after just a few hours.

Starships’ approach brings to mind 2008’s Civilization: Revolution, which simplified its namesake’s gameplay for release on mobile and console platforms. But that foray into ‘Civ light’ worked better, both because it retained more depth and because it kept a sharper eye on what sort of game it wanted to be. Starships can't make up its mind.

Still, at a discounted $15, Starships will likely be worth its sticker price for many players. It’s a pleasant enough diversion and it's competently made. But with a lack of focus and repetitive play, it just can't quite break free from its annoyingly shallow orbit.


What’s Hot: Slick, fast-paced tactical combat; easy to play in small chunks

What’s Not: Strategic wrapper feels like a distraction; limited tactical depth; too shallow and repetitive

https://games.yahoo.com/photos/sid-meier-s-starships-slideshow/sid-meier-s-starships-photo-1421786431971.html

[Hospitalier]

You should check out 'The Mandate'. It's a kickstarter that hit its goal and is now being developed by a pretty ambitious crew. It looks to be more fleshed out than Sid's Starships.