Genre: Adventure
Developer: Stardock
Publisher: Stardock

It's difficult to translate charming, hand-drawn sprite work into the world of polygons, and the result here is somewhat reminiscent of the early Xbox title "Toejam & Earl III"; bizarre texture-mapped terrain, occupied by what amounts to cartoonish "World of Warcraft" avatars. Especially during alien dialog sequences, this gives the game a somewhat cheap, cheesy, almost mobile-like quality-- which is not helped by the user interface's rather hipsterish rounded-purple motif. It's not all bad though: while exploring planetoid bodies, the player can see the system's other planets and moons-- and even the player's own orbiting ship-- in the sky! The player can also seamlessly drive from the "day" to the "night" sides, and the engine's real-time shadows are quite sophisticated. Combat stages are much more complex than those in Star Control 2, but thankfully they are still easy for the eyes to process.

Aside from Riku Nuottajärvi, the all-star musician cast from Star Control 2 is long gone. And even in the case of Riku-- what happened to his talent? There are a few planetary lander tunes which are-- frankly-- much better than the average music in today's industry. But the game also has nothing even remotely approaching the brilliance of something like the "Starbase Commander" song, to name one of many. The style of the voice acting tries to ape its famous ancestor's, but simply lacks the magical talent and inspiration of Greg Johnson and crew. Combat sounds can likewise be viewed through two lenses: highly functional, and clever by today's low bar, but-- again-- nowhere even approximating the originality of Star Control 2's iconic aural combat qualities.

With just a few minor tweaks, Origins works wonderfully with Valve's "Steam Controller", making the game as "comfy couch" friendly as Star Control 2 was for the 3DO. It's too bad then that most of the aforementioned couch time in Origins is spent traversing hilly, cratered planets via extremely bouncy, annoying lander physics, via a third-person overhead view. Resource gathering was a huge part of Star Control 2 also, but each planet only took a handful of seconds; in Origins, they take minutes, leading to serious bouts of grind-induced boredom. The new "Super Melee" feels great to play, with its expansive arenas and scoopable powerups-- but the ship designs are lacking in character and distinctiveness; many of them even have overlapping abilities! Likewise, given the cumbersome pace of planet exploration, the game's universe feels unnecessarily large and complex.

Like very nearly every modern game, this new Star Control is a padded mess: beyond the planetary exploration even, every aspect of the game seems designed around "time inflation": side quests? Tons of pointless side races? Why is any of this needed? Stardock is also positioning this release as a content creation platform-- as if what the game needs is more content! But it gets worse: every aspect of Origins' writing, right down to the obligatory "we need to change the Starbase commander to a woman", feels contrived and cargo-cultish, with every race adopting the same, one-dimensional, forced style of humor. By this point, it might sound like Origins is a terrible game: it's not! The combat is wonderful, and even the game's main adventure retains some of the core facets which made Star Control 2 so fun to play. But, the whole effort could have used a significant amount of "cutting room floor" work, because it seems like a product of either "sacred cows"-mentality, or "design-by-committee".