Starcom Nexus
Completely unexpectedly, this game is more about exploration and finding interesting phenomena on planets to discover rather than a trading simulator or combat. The combat is great fun, it has one of those module based ship builders so you can design your own, and the writing is really good. Most of the gameplay involves flying around the galaxy scanning planets, and many of them have a paragraph of text / event with choices and they're really interesting. Way longer than I was expecting, which I guess can be good or bad? Can definitely recommend it for 20 hours or so, but all the reports I'm reading say the end game is broken and the plot is never fully explained.
Pros
- Build your own ship out of blocks
- Big research tree
- Really captures that Star Trek exploration feel
- Excellent writing
- Lots of planets have anomalies which have short narrative choices to make, and can yield injuries or resources
Cons
- If I need to find a specific planet to complete a quest, there are no tools to do that at all. I have to zoom in on the map looking for a planet with an exclamation mark. Can't filter or search
- Some quest markers point to the wrong places
- Sometimes the map is wrong. There are a few planets which I've surveyed with no results. Sometimes when I open the map, those planets are marked as 'Unsurveyed Planet'
- There are several quests that just give you a description of a planet or an image. There are hundreds of planets in the game, so inspecting them all individually and comparing them to a screenshot isn't going to happen.
- By the endgame, you have a mission log full of quests, and no idea where to complete any of them
- Depending on which order you do things, it's impossible to research story-critical items late-game
- Some research doesn't function correctly
- Buggy