I didn't get terribly far into the storyline. Travel ate up most of my time, and then grinding xp and credits in random missions took care of the rest. There's not much to report from the first few missions. The old empire on Earth has come back to the Gemini Sector thanks to the big warp gate being repaired and now the civil war is back on. Your character's father is a soldier in the rebellion and gets killed in an ambush. Your character vows revenge and he learns that his father had gotten hold of some important data that he subsequently split into pieces and distributed to various people you now have to do favors for in order to figure out what he knew and why it got him killed.
I'm sure there would have been some twists and turns along the way that may or may not have been shocking, depending on how invested I got into the setting and plotline. It wasn't presented very effectively, though. Talking heads appear on your screen every once in awhile and dump exposition on you, and the voice acting and character design were merely serviceable.
I was gratified to learn that campaign mode's scripted sidequests flesh out more of the details of the game's factions and territories, though I had little interest in reading the wall of text that accompanied them so I can't actually tell you anything about them.
Starpoint Gemini 2 is exactly the sort of game I would have adored 20 years ago. The setting has so much depth and there are so many nooks and crannies to explore, but it's still finite and theoretically completable. High school me would have had unlimited patience for reading text and building up the imaginative personal canon necessary to compensate for the game's lack of life. And honestly, contemporary me shares a lot of those traits, and is only really put off by a familiarity with other games that have more to do, look prettier, have easier to digest exposition, and have deeper and more varied gameplay.
I guess what I'm saying is that Starpoint Gemini 2's biggest shortcoming is that it feels like a throwback to another era. Despite its gorgeous map, I feel like it could be translated to monochrome and text with very little loss of fidelity. That's not entirely fair to the game's creators, who did a lot of laudable work (it looks great and beside a couple of UI bugs that I resolved by restarting the game, it played very smoothly), and I'm guessing it's because the overlap between "indie" and "primitive" is pretty large. They probably lacked the resources and/or expertise to make a solar system crawling with life, but sadly, that's what a space game needs.
In the end, Starpoint Gemini 2 fills exactly the same gaming niche as X3: Terran Conflict. And while it blessedly did not have anything nearly as annoying as the latter game's menus, X3's deeper economy renders it obsolete (at least for this pacifist merchant-grinding player).
Still, I got it for free, and I think of all the free games I've played, only Path of Exile was a better value. I'll probably keep my eyes on the sequel Starpoint Gemini Warlords, which promises to marry the starship combat of the first two games with 4X elements. If this game had had infrastructure optimizing, I may well have found a new addiction.
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