Kickstarting: Star Command

All pictures from http://www.starcommandgame.com

Star Command interested me immediately as soon as I'd heard about it. In it's current mobile version, it puts you in charge of a small starship, and lets you explore strange new worlds and so on and so forth. The Star Trek influence is perhaps most strong, but the game has plenty more to offer. It's a little bit X-COM, a little bit FTL and also vaguely reminiscent of Star Control.

You begin by gathering a crew together, and assembling your choice of ship and it's components. You have a limited ability to upgrade your ship and it's rooms, all based on a token system. Those tokens are also used when hiring new crew members, and come in three varieties: Red for weapons/tactical, Blue for science/medical and Yellow for Engineering/Repair. The colour coding is maintained throughout crew uniforms and room décor, for easy reference.

I have played through a few missions and have enjoyed the touch-screen interface and even enjoyed the mini-games required for ship weapon firing (unusual for me, I usually detest mini-games!). The game has a great atmosphere, putting you in a variety of interesting situations with various aliens that you meet along the way (usually involving some sort of fight).

The art style and music are top-notch, and the background art in particular is brilliant. There are plenty of little humorous parts too, generally when reading the descriptions about equipment upgrades.

My main reason for backing the game is to see a full PC version, which unfortunately has been delayed. The main reason for this though is the vastly improved scale and scope of the PC version, which has the full name of "Star Command: Galaxies". This should mean a user interface more suited to a mouse than a touchscreen, and more opportunity to explore and upgrade your ship. Modding support was also a kickstarter goal which was reached, which can only be a benefit for this sort of game.

To bide my time between now and whenever in future Galaxies comes out, kickstarter backers were given a copy of the mobile version and will receive a port of the mobile version for PC/Mac when that is released (hopefully before the end of 2014).

The promises have sounded fantastic so far, and given that they have excelled themselves in delivering on a great mobile game I have high hopes for the PC version.