Star Control®: Origins
Skip · Shooter · 2018
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $19.99.
- Length
- 13.8h
- Value
- $1.45/hr
- Reviews
- 74% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel Integrated 520 or equivalent, 26 GB of storage. Windows only.
Star Control is a space role-playing game in which you command Earth's first interstellar starship on a mission to save the Earth from hostile alien empires.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was October 2024. It has been discounted 74 times in the 9 years tracked here, typically at 60 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 2 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 47 percent on value. It is pricier than 77 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, UNCHARTED™: Legacy of Thieves Collection ($49.99, scores 67) beats it on value, while it beats Star Wars Outlaws ($17.49, scores 28).
Of the 471 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 2 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 47 percent of the 218 reviews written there were positive, against 74 percent overall, and those are 11 percent of everything written about it.
13.8 hours to finish it, 58 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 4.2 times the campaign.
The drop-off
93% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
7 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This is a thumbs up, but a very weak one. Never played the originals. There's just not enough meat in core gameplay to sustain 20+ hours. Game gets very repetetive. Also the credits soon lose any meaning as theres not enough money sinks, I got over 300k by the end. The various bizzare aliens you meet are often hillarious (including the voice acting) and there is a lot of various alien ships that join your fleet, to...
As a teen, I spent countless sleepless nights glued to the screen playing Star Control 2. Along with games like Starflight, it sparked a love for a very specific space exploration RPG niche, a genre that felt ignored for far too long. While we did get Star Control 3 back in the day, I, like most fans, wasn't a huge fan of it. Star Control: Origins finally steps up to fill that massive gap while we all wait for Free...
i wholeheartedly reccomend this game, it was a bit pricey sure but it was the first star control game i ever played and reinforced my love for sci-fi, even if the game is a little goofy
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Star Control®: Origins scores 41/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/271260/star-control-originsThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 20, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.