Star Control 3

aka: Star Control III, Star Control: Kessari Quadrant, Star Control: The Kessari Quadrant
Moby ID: 125
DOS Specs
Buy on Windows
$3.99 new on Steam

Description official descriptions

Since the events in Star Control 2 the Ur-Quan have been pacified and the captain who bravely destroyed the Sa-Matra has had a horrible vision of the future. Suddenly without warning, all Hyperspace travel in the universe has stopped. Top scientists have pinpointed the cause of this disturbance somewhere in unexplored space in an area known as the Kessari Quadrant. Hastily assembling a fleet of ships as and an untested Precusor star drive... a loose alliance of alien races known as The League of Sentient Races sends a task force to the Kessari Quadrant. You are its commander.

Star Control 3 features a new 3D star map, new alien races to discover, new worlds to explore and colonize, new artifacts to research and a new isometric Hyper Melee battle system for inter-starship battles.

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115 People (110 developers, 5 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 68% (based on 23 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.6 out of 5 (based on 55 ratings with 14 reviews)

Much better than everyone wants to make you believe

The Good
In the first place this is an adventure game. The game has a superb story and you are a key player in it. The story starts out rather simple and gets more exciting with every new race and artifact you discover.

The alien races are very well made. Apart from the races you already know from Star Control 2, there are a dozen new ones, each with their own particular voice and music. The dialogs are very well written, the voice recordings are well done an the races are highly interesting.

If you played Star Control 2 (SC2), the game will tie up lots and lots of loose ends from that game. I don't know if everything that is being revealed was already decided upon in SC2 but it all ties in very well with the original story.

When you are stuck with the story, you have some sort of on board computer on your starship that will give you clues. Sometimes so many things are happening in the story that you just forget something you are meant to do and then this feature comes in handy.

The Bad
The strategy part of the game isn't anything challenging and you cannot really fail at it. Do not play this as a strategy game - you will find it very boring.

The ending is absolutely disappointing. After such an epic story, you get a short video sequence and some spoken text as you see the credits scrolling down. SC2 did much better in this regards.

There seems to be an occasion of bad event scripting in the game. I'm not sure if you can actually get stuck with the story but it can become very tiresome at one point if you didn't do something in the early game. Unfortunately this will make you want to start the game over.

The Bottom Line
The target audience for this game undoubtedly was the people that played SC2 before and it is not recommended playing it without having done so. While it is possible, lacking all the background story information from SC2 will make the game much less comprehensible.

Unfortunately, the fans of SC2 received this game very badly. The fact that it wasn't from the original creators generated a lot of bias against it even before it was released. Since it was somewhat different from SC2, most of those people saw their prejudices confirmed and didn't really give it a chance.

To me, SC2 was one of the biggest games of its time and still is today. SC3 isn't as good as it if you compare it directly, but it's very different and stays very true to the original story setting. It's less strategy and more story telling. At this it succeeds and even surpasses SC2 in my opinion.

If you found the resource collecting in SC2 tiresome at some point (I sure did) and preferred interacting with other races and being a diplomat, you will love this game.

DOS · by vulture (15) · 2008

Not a bad game, if you judge it on it's own merits.

The Good
The storyline isnt bad at all, and some of the dialogues are quite amusing - even if they are a little to long winded in places. As long as you don't compare it to SC2 (as others seem to do) then you'll probably enjoy the game.

The Bad
The colony managment parts seem to have been an after thought (I played the game right through barely having to manage the colonies at all.)

The Bottom Line
Keep your expectations low and you'll be ok

DOS · by Marrsy (57) · 2001

Enraging on every level

The Good
I won't mince words here. I hated this game, and I still hate it with every fiber of my being. I have bought some really lousy games over the years, but Star Control 3 is the one I think of when I think about absolute wastes of time and money. The one glimmer, iota if you will, of glee Star Control 3 gave me was when I plucked it off of the store shelf, brought it to the register, and bought it. I had THE sequel to my beloved Star Control II in my hands, and I drove 120 miles round trip to get it. Star Control II has a universe so rich and deep that it would take a team of the worlds largest collection of numbskulls to screw up the sequel.

Enter Legend Entertainment.

The Bad
If I had written this at the time when I removed the Star Control 3 CD from my CD tray and chucked it across the room, I could have written an encyclopedia length entry here. But let's start with what I remember now, and as my blood pressure rises, I may remember more.

When I first opened the box, I noticed a very barren manual. Sure, it told me how to play the game, but I was looking for a little more. The Star Control II manual (like the Star Control I manual) had a backstory and background in order to prime the player to enjoy the immersive environment of the game. Not only did Star Control 3 NOT have that included in the manual (to any significant degree), it also included a (apparently) hastily printed addendum on a small slip of paper warning of a bug. Basically, it said if you wanted to play Star Control HyperMelee over a LAN, DON'T HIT THE PLANET because the session will fall out of sync. In essence, they pretty much said that a major advertised feature of the game (network play) was broken and by scrawling this disclaimer on a slip of paper, they absolved themselves of the crummy coding and had no intention to fix it. Since I wanted to play the game on Kali, I was a little disappointed. Disappointed even before I had even got home and unleashed this horrible game on my PC's hard drive. Not a good sign.

The ships were so incredibly unbalanced in Hypermeelee that it was possible to have fights where the battle would NEVER end. There is a defensive Crux ship that would spawn shields and has virtually no offensive weapons. If this ill-conceived ship fought a ship with light offensive weapons (or Heaven forbid, ITSELF) the fight could last for hours, or even DAYS if allowed to play out. Some of the new ships were useless beyond belief, and they ripped out several Star Control II ships for no apparent reason (aside from the fact that they weren't races represented in the game... but Star Control II put in ships like the Androsynth and the Chmmr despite their absence as space faring races in the Star Control II adventure game. Star Control 3 had neither. No Thraddash, Zot Fot Piq, Supox, ad nauseum).

The 3D battle mode was next to worthless, in that worthless would be a step up. The perspective was so askew that fighting in this mode was like an exercise in banging your face against concrete.

I could go on about Hypermelee, but I'll just boil it down to "dreadful" and "complete waste of time". My friends and I used to play Star Control I and II hypermelee for hours, laughing and having a good time. After a hour with Star Control III, they never wanted to play it again.

SO, let's move on the the adventure part of the game.

If you have read the other reviews, you'll know that Star Control III is just a retelling of Star Control II. The Utwig break their Ultron. The Ur Quan start fighting the Kor-Ah. But it gets worse than that. The original ideas they DID have just stink. The Mycon have rebellious youth who get all whiny and feel like picking daisies. You meet a race of bacteria who have taken up residence in a cow (that was native to your homeworld) and travel space for some reason. The Crux races seem to have no idea what was going on around them . For example, I had most of the Crux races allied with me, and the "lead baddie" Crux leader race hyperjumps in and tells me how bad the war is going for me (despite the fact he only had about THREE original races in his alliance and I was kicking thier rear ends every time we met). It all felt so derivitive, so scripted, so outright unpolished.

So let's talk muppets. One of the big selling points I saw for this game in the ad copy was that the aliens were designed by professional Hollywood puppeteers. I would like to know what other work these guys have done, because the puppets are really lousy. I mean, they're not sock puppets by any stretch, but some of the effects and attempts would be laughable if they weren't so annoying. The humanoid characters (human and Syreen) look like they were born with some bizarre soft-skull disease. There is a race of aliens that eat these fuzzy things that perch on their shoulders (for some reason these creatures live to be eaten by those alien lizard guys) so they dash into their open mouthes as though they were fetching gold bars from the lizard's throat. You could almost see the string pulling the fuzzy things, and Cookie Monster of Sesame Street fame looks more convincing eating a cookie than these lizard guys eating those suicidal fuzzy creatures. If the guys constructing the puppets were professionals, the puppets must have been thrown together on some drunken weekend without the proper tools or materials.

Which leads us to the voice talent. In all, it is pretty amateurish (the budget must have gone towards constructing those puppet monstrosities) but the one that really stands out in my mind is the Doog. As you may have guessed, the creatively named Doog are a canine race that looks like a cross between a bulldog and a cromagnon.The guy doing the voiceover sounded as though he wanted me to "tell him about the rabbits" as he stroked a dead mouse in his pocket. Despite thier portrayal as the most dimwitted race in the game, the Doog had somehow mastered the art of interstellar warfare. They constructed a ship that would tear nearly every other ship to ribbons without doing anything more than holding down their fire button. The best ships in the game, like the Avatar, would be no match for a Doog ship piloted by the worlds worst pilot. Which leads to a certain disconnect between the race and the ship they fly. Sure, the Doog sounded like Lenny, but man oh man could they construct a ship like no ones business.

And the music... oh Lord the music. After being enthralled by the MODs of Star Control II, Star Control 3 followed it up by offering us MIDI. Yes, the same music that was the staple of every teenage web designers website back in those days were now tinningly chiming their way from my computer speakers to my ears. Aside from being annoying and dislikable, they were forgetable in every respect (in comparison, I can hum nearly every Star Control II tune despite the fact that I haven't played the game for over ten years).

So let's move on to technical support. I know if you get your hands on a copy of Star Control III, you won't have the luxury of having your questions fielded by a crack team of support specialists standing by the phones at every waking hour, and ready to pounce on every e-mail arrival chime. Well, I bought this game brand spankin' new on the day it was released, and I didn't have that luxury either. I encountered a "show stopper" bug which would not allow the game to continue, so I fired off a rather curt e-mail. My comments and questions were ignored wholesale. I pointed out bugs, inconsistancies, and quality control issues. I asked questions and tried to get them to tell me how I could continue my game (a trigger failed to happen, so the game could not continue past the point I was at despite trying for endless hours to figure out what I was missing... I finally realized I didn't miss anything, it was simply a show-stopping bug). I had apparently bought an orphaned piece of software. Orphaned seven days after wide release. While this is more common nowadays, this was the first time I encountered it. After waiting and firing off some follow up messages, I realized that Legend wasn't going to support this "space opera extrordinarre" and I hurled the CD from the drive.

Yes, I said I encountered a show-stopper bug. I am surprised none of the other reviewers on Mobygames have had this experience. Since this game was never patched, the bug is still out there somewhere, waiting to slap an unsuspecting player across the face. A piece of software can do nothing more insulting to a player than to end a game prematurely by not allowing them to continue past a certain point. My hours of gaming time were utterly wasted. In retrospect, I imagine that the bug may have been a blessing in disguise, as I can't help but to think that the game would have never gotten better. But just as I sit though a crummy film in the hope that it will somehow redeem itself, I had to try to play Star Control 3 through to the end. I never did, and I'd bet I spent my time doing better things back then. Like darning socks.

This game is garbage, through and through. While time may have dulled my rage at the creators of this product, I shall put out this warning: This game should not be bought or played by anyone at any time. If your time is a precious commodity yet you have the choice between playing this game and throwing playing cards into an overturned fedora, choose the later. It's time better spent.

The Bottom Line
Hm... How would I describe this game to others... While bad software and misburned CDs are often referred to as a "coaster", try to think of something more creative to do with the CD, manual and packaging of Star Control 3. While having your end table shielded from a cold beverage's condensation is a swell thing, it is a purpose far greater than this piece of crudware is worthy of.

DOS · by APFelon (19) · 2005

[ View all 14 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Star Control 3 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Novel

A novel titled Star Control: Interbellum was published by Prima and written by author W. T. Quick. The book supposedly contains story and events that takes place between Star Control 2 and Star Control 3... however the popular opinion is that the author has never played or was ever given the plot to either game. Also the player character of both games is given a name for the novel, "Commander Omega".

Screenshot capturing technique

This game will dump a screenshot to a .PCX file if you hit PRTSC during gameplay.

Star Control III

Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III owned the character rights to the various alien races, Accolade owned the Star Control copyright. When the original creators declined to make the new sequel, Accolade gave them an ultimatum; sell the character rights or part three would be made with entirely new characters, no continuity involved whatsoever. The creators decided to make some final money off of their creations. A side note to this is that none of the original artists involved with Star Control II were even approached to work on Star Control III.

Information also contributed by Aaron Grier, Vance, and WildKard

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Trixter.

Windows added by Picard. Macintosh added by Terok Nor.

Additional contributors: RmM, Shoddyan, PoliticallyCorrupt, Plok, FatherJack.

Game added May 21, 1999. Last modified March 18, 2024.