Starcom Nexus is a 2D space game focused on exploration and shipbuilding. It’s apparently based on a late 2000s Flash game, but it reminds me a lot of Sunless Sea if it were less grindy and locations rarely had anything to do on subsequent visits. You’ll spend your time traveling between various solar systems, scanning planets for anomalies, getting in fights, and then using the things you’ve found to upgrade your ship and find new systems. Most systems are individually pretty simple, but they add up to a highly entertaining whole.
This kind of game lives or dies based on how fun it is to explore, so let’s start there. While it’s a little disappointing that there are hardly any locations with as much to do as even the simplest island in Sunless Sea, it makes up for it having dozens upon dozens of unique locations. You may not ever come back to most of them, but there are so many that you’re never short of new things to find. Even better, while many games with loads of explorable locations fall into the trap of having them all be the same thing, Starcom is great at giving almost every anomaly either some interesting flavor, a reward worth having, or a unique interaction. There are also a wide variety of quests that reward you for paying attention and trying things out, so you’ve always got something that’s encouraging you to explore just one more system.
The writing and story follow a similar philosophy to the overall exploration in that they’re not exactly deep, but they are filled with interesting ideas. Are you going to remember any of the characters or alien races from this game? Almost certainly not. But you probably will find some interesting planetary backstories or quests that do stick with you, and it does a surprisingly good job of presenting you with meaningful choices without just making you click one of a few buttons. It’s not setting a new bar for the industry or anything, but it’s a lot better done than you’d probably expect from this kind of game.
Combat and tech trees a little more of a mixed bag. I love that the ship building gives you almost complete freedom to build whatever you want, and I love even more that so many of the techs are only available for research once you’ve explored the right places. Unlocking new techs and boosting the performance of your ship is as much fun as it is in any game, but it’s held back a little by the combat being largely trivial if you just build a bunch of plasma turrets and enough engines to run away when you need to. None of the other weapon technologies are really worth the trouble when plasma is so effective, and there’s not a ton of need to worry about defense when you can easily just run away and wait for your ship to repair itself. You will sometimes die in combat if you try to explore certain areas too early or you’re not careful, but by and large even the encounters that are meant to be boss fights aren’t that hard. I died far more often from a bug that instantly kills you if you interact with an object just before bumping into it than I did in combat.
The game’s other noteworthy flaw is that, as much fun as its more open-ended quests can be, it sometimes gets in its own way with poor communication. Usually it’s just that the game doesn’t have an indicator or quest log where you’d expect one, which leads to a bunch of pointless flying around before you think to revisit home base and find a new interaction. Those issues are easy enough to clear up with a Steam Forum search if you have to, but my playthrough was extended by several hours because of a late game quest where the game gave me explicit instructions that were completely wrong. Instead of aimlessly exploring the entire map for another interaction that didn’t exist, what I actually needed to do was, inexplicably, to try doing the same thing again. It’s hard to defend directions that are that bad, especially since the game is still getting updates.
Conclusion
Still, despite the occasionally frustrating quests and trivial combat, Starcom Nexus is very much worth playing. There just aren’t that many of this kind of exploration game, and too many of the ones that do exist aren’t even that fun to explore. This isn’t by any means a perfect game, but it gets the important things right and most of its flaws can be worked around. Plus, it’s pretty cheap.
Rating: 80%
Time to beat: 24 hours to do almost everything
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