Sid Meier’s Starships (PC) Review

By Ian Soltes 28.03.2015

Review for Sid Meier’s Starships on PC

It should have been a slam-dunk - something too easy to do to possibly fail at - yet against all odds, Sid Meier's Starships has managed to botch up a great idea with a series of seriously inept design choices that left the game of questionable value at best. It's not that there is, somehow, no potential here, as there is plenty of potential! It just gets ruined by a desire to appeal to lazy design and comes across as very disappointing.

When one thinks of Sid Meier, the famous Civilization series comes to mind, first and foremost. Why wouldn't it? Civilization is practically the definition of the turn-based strategy game, and the fear of Ghandi's nuclear arsenal is a near-universal fear held by all that have played his games. Even beyond that, Sid Meier has had two forays into the science fiction genre, with both Sid Meier's Alpha Centurai and the recently released Beyond Earth. The prospect of taking it to the stars, allowing for the player to no longer be confined by planetary design but to, rather, reach to the corners of the galaxy, should have been wonderful - exploring many strange new worlds and solar systems across a massive galaxy teeming with chances for unique design…

It got all ruined because of the worst series of design flaws possible, though. Developed by Firaxis Games and published by 2K, Starships is just… wrong. The bad choices become apparent as soon as the game is simply booted up, as it does not have an option to go full-screen. Before the title is even reached, the first flaw can be seen. This game was designed not for use on the PC but, rather, for tablets, and the developers couldn't be bothered enough to make the simple programming requirements to turn it into a proper PC game.

Screenshot for Sid Meier’s Starships on PC

The flaws do not stop there. One of the most advertised features was the ability to bring over data from a Beyond Earth game and then use it for the Starships battle. Once again, on paper, this seems like something too easy to do to mess up. Just take the data, give a few bonuses to people who transfer and acknowledgement of their prior win, and then let them have at it in the galaxy. Once again, though, this fails because of the most stupid and inept of design choices in that it works both ways, and getting full unlocks in Beyond Earth will require playing Starships. Two games get hampered by the poor choices in Starships!

That can be put aside, however. Tablet games can still be good, after all. Not following the obvious route does not mean failure, and Beyond Earth is still quite enjoyable even with the poor choices… How does Starships continue to muck it up, then? What flaw truly condemns it to the pile of a sorely-missed? The answer is simple. At the start of the game, the player is allowed to pick victory conditions. This should seem simple as to be impossible to muck up. If the player picks a science condition the only way to legit win is a scientific victory… right? Right? Wrong. In Starships, picking a victory condition only affects the player. The computer is allowed to win by any means they so desire, regardless of the laid out conditions. That science victory? If the computer gets enough wonders for a wonder victory, it will win regardless. This results in limiting the style of gameplay to 'destroy everything possible' or else risk losing the game.

Screenshot for Sid Meier’s Starships on PC

Enough about the problems, though; the game itself has yet to be laid out. How does it play? Well… pretty simply. The player starts the game on a home planet, which provides a set income of food, science, metal, and energy, as well as having a small fleet to deploy. They can then travel to the various nearby planets to engage in ship to ship battles, winning influence. When enough influence is earned, the planet joins the player's faction entirely and… it's mind-numbingly straightforward. Each resource has only one use, and not in the good manner. Each turn will unfold with the player spending food to build cities, metal to build buildings, science to upgrade tech; which does little more than replace numbers with bigger numbers, instead of providing new buildings or units, then energy to build and upgrade their fleet. Each planet aside from the home planet excels at one thing, so, barring a mass starvation for one of the resources, it's only worth it to build one kind of building on each planet after making a Warp gate (easy travel) and maybe some defensive buildings.

Starships does do one thing right, though, and it's the ship battles. Whenever a battle takes place, instead of simply comparing numbers, it unfolds in a decently tactical manner, and it feels as if actual effort went into the battle designs. Indeed, the battles are almost the only place where the game really excels. With varied objectives ranging from the most basic of 'kill all enemies' to navigating asteroid mazes, the battles come across as varied and actually both enjoyable and tactical. Something as simple as laying out a missile spread for the best arrangement two to three turns down the line, or designating one ship to serve as a carrier and a second to be a long-range blaster, with a third as a short-range heavily-shielded ship, is actually a smart decision and results in some good gameplay.

Screenshot for Sid Meier’s Starships on PC

In fact, with some very simple patches, the game could actually become quite an acceptable game. Simply allowing full-screen, encouraging more varied building strategies, and at least making the 'AI can win with all victory conditions' feature optional instead of forced would make it… fine. Bouts are relatively fast instead of the slower style of the prior games, which isn't a bad thing. It just means that people looking for multiple hours of gameplay should play Beyond Earth instead, and save Starships for when they want a 'quick' fix of turn-based strategy.

The game isn't actually 'bad' on the whole; just stupidly limited by choices that should have been obvious and easy to fix. If they had been fixed, it would have been a decent tablet game and a fun little distraction for PC gamers that, while nowhere near as deep as other turn-based games, would be a nice title for those late nights with an hour or two to waste without wanting to start a grand campaign.

Screenshot for Sid Meier’s Starships on PC

Cubed3 Rating

5/10
Rated 5 out of 10

Average

Starships should have rated higher. It would be if Firaxis had bothered to address the simple problems that should have been obvious from day one. Simple things like making full-screen or making the computer's win conditions optional. However, as it is, it's little more than a glorified tablet game a few steps above the company's prior attempt to bring the series to the Nintendo DS way back when. With the fixes, the score would rise easily, especially if it later offers mod support, but as-is… it's just a disappointing miss for something that should have been so easy to get right.

Developer

Firaxis

Publisher

2K

Genre

Strategy

Players

1

C3 Score

Rated $score out of 10  5/10

Reader Score

Rated $score out of 10  0 (0 Votes)

European release date Out now   North America release date Out now   Japan release date Out now   Australian release date Out now   

Comments

Comments are currently disabled

Subscribe to this topic Subscribe to this topic

If you are a registered member and logged in, you can also subscribe to topics by email.
Sign up today for blogs, games collections, reader reviews and much more
Site Feed
Who's Online?
Insanoflex

There are 1 members online at the moment.