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 it's 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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The cast of aliens are now handcrafted puppets and most of them look great and have a certain charm to them, but the ones that don't look really bad.
The star map now has a search function and tags so that you can easily search for any system you're trying to find, but the map itself is impossible to read because of issues pertaining to depth perception.
Races from the previous game return and join forces with the protagonist, only to be either underutilized, repeat previous dialogue verbatim, or have their backstories retconned. (The Syreen in particular frustrated me as their backstory in StarCon2 discussed how they developed primarily due to their agricultural society which was safeguarded from the hunter-gatherers tribes by the mountainous regions of their homeward until war and conquest was an impracticality. The sexual and political structures for the Syreen differed from humans similar to how the sexual structures in chimpanzees and bonobos differ in the real world. In StarCon3 their backstory is boiled down to "we never had misogyny lol")
I still enjoyed parts of the game for what its worth and I can still recommend it, but you need to go in with the right expectations to enjoy it.