I think it's all going to work out fine. Starpoint Gemini 2 is not a great game, but where it fails, it fails within my wheelhouse.
Most of what I've done so far is travel between far-flung locations. Even before I decided my first goal was to clear away as much of the fog-of-war as possible, I spent the bulk of my time uneventfully flying from place to place. Occasionally, I'd get attacked by random NPCs, but the starting ship was more than fast enough to outpace pursuit. I'd drift into a battle, take a couple of shots, and then drift out as if nothing at all had happened.
This is how I like my space games. I'm in an endless void clinging desperately to a few fragile points of light, and that's what I want to feel. The main failing of Starpoint Gemini 2 is that these points of light are not interesting enough to be worth visiting on their own merits. There's 50-odd factions in the game, but visiting any particular space station brings you the same generic station menu. There's no character, no life, to any of the places you visit.
To be fair, part of that may be because I've passed on the game's story mode. I started out innocently enough, attempting the Genesis DLC (that retold the story of the first game in the second's engine), but I quickly lost the thread of the plot. I guess there was this star system that wanted to be free of Earth's control, and so they fought a war, and in the course of this war, the FTL gateway that connected the system to earth got blown up, and this created a temporal anomaly that trapped the main character in some kind of time-free alternate universe until a science ship released him . . . and that's the start of the first game. The second one begins some time later when Earth has returned and started kicking ass. There is a confusingly large amount of back story that seems like it should have been the plot of an actual game, and so I'm not sure where I fit in as a character.
Which is why I've been playing "free roam" mode for the bulk of the last 6 hours. It's Starpoint Gemini 2's open world, without the main story missions. On the one hand, this is a good idea and I can think of a couple of open world games that I'd like to see offer this option. On the other hand, from what I've seen so far, this particular open world doesn't have enough inherent interest to support itself purely on side quests.
I'm torn. I currently have an actionable goal that will likely take me to 20 hours and beyond - visiting every hex on the game's fantastically large map. And yet, even I have to admit that playing the story missions is probably a better use of my time.
Maybe if the story missions were better paced. As it is, I spent a lot of time ineffectually flailing about in a chaotic space battle, and a lot more time flying to the next mission's start point after the battle was complete. So it doesn't exactly feel like I'm trading in a life of tedious grinding for the chance to be a swashbuckling space hero.
. . . And the choice is made. At least for the near term, pointless space cartography is the way I'm going to go. Maybe at some point I'll stop inside a station and take the time to read the news bulletins, and that will make me fall so in love with this universe that I decide I want to help decide the fate of the sector. But more likely is that I finally do enough random side missions to save up for a frigate and then it will be all mining all the time.
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