Win Game Store
0
More boring than an RTS
Starion Tactics is basically a board game version of a space RTS. If the battles were more interesting or the stages had more variety this game could be decent. As it is, the game is like Monopoly without Chance or Community Chest cards, you just keep shuffling around the board until someone wins or, more likely, everyone quits.
The game looks decent, but it's a hollow facade. There's 3 different game modes that are all essentially the same with a few features added or removed. There is no story mode or campaign, if there's a difference between factions besides the color then I can't really tell. The resource management aspect is pretty shallow, you pay points to make ships, bigger ships cost more, but you can make whatever you want with enough money and points.
The tutorial is pretty bare-bones too, 10 slides describing what various symbols on the UI mean, yet it still contains pretty much all the information you need to play the game, frankly that isn't good.
The problem is there's a lot you can do with a video board game that this game doesn't do. The only value of various planets are the number of resources and the fact you can build new ships. The combat is a simple battle of numbers in normal mode, and random dice throws in board game mode. I couldn't even tell what happened in the dice battles because there's almost no feedback. It doesn't say HIT or MISS, and the dice aren't adequately explained in the minimal tutorial, so you're basically just waiting until the end to see who survives. The boards themselves are just a Chinese Checkers board with random planets, which gets very boring even within a single play through.
I'd rate the game lower but it's not really a bad game, just lackluster and incomplete. With a few more features to spice up combat and different types of terrain, maybe a Campaign/Tutorial mode to give some context to the warring factions and it could be a decent game.
