Review anarchistica 3/5 · Sep 27, 2021
Star Trek: The JRPG
Intro
As the title implies, this is a Star Trek-ish themed game in which you build up a space station, and send fleets to fight enemies and gather resources. And just like in Star Trek a handful of people both control the ships and fight on the ground.
The Good
- The theme is cute.
- The worldbuilding is decent with a …
Intro
As the title implies, this is a Star Trek-ish themed game in which you build up a space station, and send fleets to fight enemies and gather resources. And just like in Star Trek a handful of people both control the ships and fight on the ground.
The Good
- The theme is cute.
- The worldbuilding is decent with a variety of aliens, weapons, etc.
- Each officer has an own ship (two varieties) and skill tree with multiple paths to develop.
- The combat is clever with a mix of combos and disabling attacks.
- There are a handful of role-playing options.
- Easy difficulty + ways to play at your own pace.
The Bad
- The interface is too small and iffy.
- It also displays information quite poorly.
- Only two types of ships per class, with no other options available (e.g. weapon selection).
- Enemy stats require clicking on a tiny box on their body instead of just hovering over them.
- Upgrading normal crew seems mostly pointless.
- Manual resource generation is done in batches (X days to get Y).
- No auto-pause for level ups.
- Assigning officers to tasks gets tedious.
- Limited use repair power can't be used outside of combat.
The Ugly
You're mostly going to use the same three officers on the same three ships against the same Cruul enemies. Officers level up so you want to use the strongest you have, switching ships other than getting higher tiers serves no point and other than some pirates early on you basically always fight the same dudes. And because they tend to have similar resistances you mostly use the same abilities. You end up fighting more or less the same battles over and over and over again.
Conclusion
Cool concept, poor execution. After 10-11 hours i beat the mothership (i'll admit i dragged it out too long, but still) and the game just goes "there's more enemies, grind out better ships to fight the same battle a few dozen more times". Nah.
