Star Control II

Star Control II is an action-adventure science fiction game, set in an open universe. It features ship-to-ship combat based on the original Star Control, but removes the first game's strategy gameplay to focus on story and dialog, as seen in other adventure games. The player's goal is to free Earth from the evil Ur-Quan, by recruiting aliens to help. The main gameplay elements are exploring the galaxy, gathering resources, building a fleet, defeating enemy ships, and conversing with aliens.

One-on-one spaceship battles take place in real-time, based on the core gameplay of the original Star Control. Each ship has unique weapons, maneuvers, and secondary abilities, and winning a battle requires a combination of ship selection and skill. This combat mode can be played separately in a two-player battle mode called Super Melee. In the story mode, the player is limited to the ships they can gain from sympathetic alien races, whereas Super Melee includes every ship in both Star Control games. The only ship unique to the story mode is the player's capital ship, which is upgraded as the player gains new technology and resources.

Whereas the first Star Control stores most of its lore in the instruction manual, Star Control II continues the story with a rich in-game experience, playing through events after the Alliance is defeated by the Hierarchy. In the last phase of the war between the Alliance of Free Stars and the Hierarchy of Battle Thralls, an Earthling ship discovered an ancient Precursor subterranean installation in the Vela star system. A massive Hierarchy offensive forced the Alliance fleets to retreat beyond Vela, stranding the science expedition, who went in to hiding. Decades later, with the help of a genius child born on the planet, the colonists activated the Precursor machinery and found out that it was programmed to build a highly advanced but unfinished starship, which could be piloted only by the now grown genius child, who alone could interact with the Precursor central computer. The new ship set out to Sol to make contact with Earth, but shortly before reaching Sol the little fleet was attacked by an unknown probe; The expedition commander, captaining the expedition's Earthling Cruiser, intercepted the alien ship before it could damage the defenseless Precursor starship, but was killed in the short fight, leaving the genius young man in command.

The player begins the game as the commander of the Precursor starship, who returns to Earth to find it enslaved by the Ur-Quan. The Captain gains the support of the skeleton crew of Earth's caretaker starbase and ventures out to contact the other races to find out what's happened since the end of the war and try to recruit allies in to a New Alliance of Free Stars against the Ur-Quan. The Captain quickly discovers that the rest of the humans' allies in the war against the Ur-Quan have either been eradicated, put under slave shields, or put into service as Ur-Quan battle thralls. As the player progresses, it is revealed that the Ur-Quan are fighting an internecine war with the Kohr-Ah, a subspecies of Ur-Quan who believe in eradicating all life in the galaxy, as opposed to enslaving it.

Star Control II began as a more ambitious project than the original Star Control, with Reiche and Ford hoping to go beyond ship combat to develop a "science fiction adventure role-playing game". The team credits the pre-existing combat from the original Star Control with giving them a strong core to build a larger game around. The sequel would develop into a much more detailed adventure than the first edition. Ford explains that the original Star Control had "some story there, but it was mostly in the manual.

In Star Control II, we made a conscious decision to tell more of a story". The duo would downplay the scale of the game when pitching it to their publisher Accolade, and the game's development would eventually go over schedule.

Star Control II received a positive reception around its release, as well as several awards. Soon after, Star Control II began to appear on many "all time best" lists for players and industry figures, a reputation that has continued ever since.

Computer Gaming World stated that Star Control II was as much a sequel to Starflight as to Star Control. The reviewer praised the VGA graphics and wrote that the game "has some of the best dialogue ever encountered in this genre". He concluded that the game "has been placed on this reviewer's top ten list of all time ... one of the most enjoyable games to review all year.

Long after its release, Star Control II continues to garner acclaim across the game industry. Responding to film critics who criticized video games as a superficial medium, The Escapist magazine highlighted Star Control II as "the scripting was second to none. Don't be fooled by the fantastical setting - the story maturely dealt with wide ranging issues, from genocide to religious extremism, and still remained terrifying, touching, and damn funny in places." The magazine would revisit this in a 2014 retrospective, calling it a "must play for space loving gamers", offering "a massive experience filled with exploration, action and some of the funniest aliens you'll run into any video game".

Rock Paper Shotgun featured the game in 2016, celebrating "some of the most memorable aliens ever put in a game, and still some of the best written." , [b]ut once you surmount those obstacles, it reveals itself as one of the smartest, funniest, most adventure-filled science fiction games ever made". In a multi-part feature on the history of video games, VGChartz noted that Star Control II is "often considered one of the greatest games ever made". Kotaku referred to it as "one of the early '90s most revolutionary sci-fi games", and game historian Rusel DeMaria describes it as one of the best games ever written.