iPhone and iPad spaceship combat game Star Command has been Kickstarted nearly to pieces.
Even after one successful Kickstarter campaign, its developer ran into serious financial problems and ended up launching a second campaign, which made significantly more money.
Even still, the game that has now been released into the wild is not the game that was promised.
The original pitch for Star Command hinted that there would be exploration of areas other than your own ship, and complex diplomacy systems like those found in the Civilization series. Warballoon name-dropped X-Com, Game Dev Story and The Sims as its inspirations.
What the team has delivered, however, bears not even a passing resemblance to any of these games. Star Command is a one-vs.-one spaceship battle game with occasional story breaks and lots of saving and reloading. There is dialogue from the mouths and mandibles of alien antagonists. There are randomly-generated crewpeople who will probably be blown out into the void of space within minutes of you hiring them. But there is not much more; X-Com it is not.
Broken promises aside, the game itself is simply not very good. Battles drag on for far too long, the touch controls range from finicky to unusable and artificially intelligent crew members are so unintelligent that they'll dawdle in raging fires and burn to death unless you order them to save their own skins. Since micromanaging with taps on the screen is already so difficult, this becomes even more frustrating than it otherwise would have been.
Even the game's writing, with its endless nerd culture references, is not nearly as cute or funny as it thinks it is. Of course, it doesn't help that all text is rendered in a nearly-unreadable retro-style font.
Star Command is far more ambitious than most mobile games. Its soundtrack is impressive, and its art is charming. Warballoon says it will continue work on the game, and that versions for Android, Windows and Mac are coming soon. The issues that make it sometimes impossible to play on iPhone and iPad could be addressed with a mouse and keyboard, and a few good patches could fix the stupid AI.
But for now, anyone considering lending their time to a spaceship battle game would be far better off buying FTL: Faster Than Light, last year's hardcore indie strategy game for Windows, Mac and Linux. That, too, was Kickstarted, and it was everything (and more) that it was supposed to be.
Many more early Kickstarter successes will be shipping this year. I'm afraid that Star Command will not be the last to disappoint.
