That review follows the line of "Reviewer doesn't know how to play Star Control" that had been mentioned earlier, and justifies Wardell's message about How To Play The Game. You only go for the "Gobble up everything in sight" approach while you're still in the Sol system. Once you're out and exploring you only grab the valuable resources that are easily acquired, make a note of the ones that you'll have to come back to later, and skip the rest. This means that every haul you bring back will be quite valuable, and cut down on the grinding. This is also how it was in Star Control 2. The fact that the reviewer doesn't bother thinking for a moment here reveals to us that he's never played Star Control 2 either. At best he watched a few YouTube videos of a Let's Play of UQM.
But SC:O does a piss poor job of communicating this to the player, nor does it lend him a hand for doing just that.
Even if you just look at the resource gathering in isolation, I think you already see a ton of problems in this game.
You are basically doing the same thing you did in SC2, but the minimalistic 2D top-down minigame has been replaced by a fully realized 3d environment. Navigating it requires more time and is more annoying because you can get hung on scenery and stuff. Unlike in SC2, there's no planetary map in sight. Wtf? So resource hunting is more time consuming and more annoying than in the old game. Well done indeed.
Also, upgrades and ships cost resources, so the game kinda does encourage you to grind - especially with that one component which only skips the almost inconsequential minigame when landing on a planet costing 15000RU.
Zooming out a little, the game does not keep track for you what resources and specials are on a planet. Keep note of resources you might want to come back for is a strange advice when you have no idea what resources this might refer to.
There should be a system database, where you can click on any system on the stellar map, see at a glance the percentage of bodies you have explored in it, see which resources to find on which planet you have explored, see the atmospheric conditions of each, related quests and whatnot. None of that is in the game. Sure, you had to keep track of that in SC2 yourself, but this was in an era where you would also know everyones phone number from memory instead of relying on your smartphone for storing them all.
I thought part of Stardock's income comes from business software - don't they have ANY expertise in these things?
Rather than a SC2 vibe, the planetary exploration reminded me of the planetary exploration in the first Mass Effect, except there was hardly ever anything (beyond resources) worth discovering, the variety was severly lacking, the visuals had a spore-vibe to them and a hostile alien would basically insta-kill the lander. Which idiot came up with that shit?
The review praises the combat, yet I feel they managed to mess this up as well. It's a fairly close approximation of the original, and it kinda sorta works some of the time, but then again ... the AI in it is so godawful.
Getting the auto-combat module (which you can NOT toggle on and off at your leisure - the stardock guy who made this decision should retire from game design immediately) is like a trip to the mental asylum.
Ships will ignore enviromental hazards, willingly crash into asteroids on their own accord, even if it costs them precious crew. Weapon loadouts will be ignored, the AI will navigate straight on into a line of boarding shuttles that will destroy it's ship, it will circle strafe for minutes, it will try to get an enemy into it's sights even when it does have no forward firing weapon ... it's really pure insanity.
Controlling the battles yourself can sometimes be enjoyable, but then again, often enough fighting will drag itself out far beyond the length it can be interesting for.
Same as the reviewer, I kinda thought the aliens were mostly neat, but there's maybe 20% of the interaction with them there should be, or - to put it differently - 80% of the fleshing out conversations should have is just not there.
Why does an alien even hail me when there's two conversation options and both result in immediate combat?
As early as after the mission to reach the Tywom homeworld you face a mission that will require tons of grinding or at the very least clueless system exploration as you cannot reach the worlds you should go to with your fuel allotment.
In hindsight, this was when the game started falling apart for me. Like I said earlier, if the player was supposed to play differently, the game would have to do a much, MUCH better job of communicating that - and also make it desireable.
