Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Uninspired"

The game isn't terrible, or even bad. It's just...meh. It certainly doesn't rate the 8.0 Gamespot gave it – which affected my purchase decision (a policy that I am in the process of reevaluating, after several questionable Gamespot reviews).

I suppose I should start with the good stuff, but the problem is that most of the good stuff is just superficial. Graphics, sound, etc. All fine. Not spectacular. But fine.

The basic concept of the game is also fine. No point going into that; you can read the Gamespot review. They managed to get that part right.

Here are the questionable design choices, in order of importance / frustration.

Tech Tree. The tech tree is too big, too complex, filled with too many pointless technologies, too confusing, too hard to prioritize, and the UI stinks. It's hard to pick the techs to research, and VERY easy to accidently cancel your research in progress while you are reviewing / puzzling out others. There is little or no information on how each tech will specifically impact you. A combination of very strange design decisions. Reminds me of some old Paradox titles, like HOI 1. But worse.

Combat. You don't control your individual ships, just the fleet. And you control the fleet by picking "cards" representing different strategies. Each strategy card has a corresponding counter card, so you are basically just guessing what the computer will pick and hoping you get lucky. Space combat has been reduced to "rock, paper, scissors". Endless Roshambo. Watching the fleets shoot at each other is kind of fun the first few times you do it.

Strategic Map. More strange design choices. There is very little information on display without having to manually dig to find it. And there are LOTS of turns, so lots of digging. There should be more HUD info. There don't appear to be any hot keys, or if there are you can't remap them, so there is no list of them inside the game. The use of the ESC key is also frustrating. Some panels are closed by ESC, and sometimes ESC leaves the panel open and brings you to the save game menu. Which is odd.

Fleet Management. Moving ships / fleets is annoying. Sometimes they move, sometimes they don't. When they don't move no information is displayed on why not, leaving you to puzzle it out yourself. The whole movement thing just feels awkward. When you encounter hostile fleets sometimes battle starts automatically, and sometimes not. I'm sure there's a reason, but I haven't puzzled it out yet. And assigning ships to fleets is a chore. The fleet management interface is just plain bad.

"You Lose". It's happened to me several times. A message pops up and tells you that you have lost, even if you are peacefully growing a healthy empire. No information on why you lost is provided. No warning messages are provided telling you that "Empire X is taking over the galaxy!" Just, "you lose". Very irritating.

Final Analysis: One of the designers said in an interview, "This game takes a very long time to master". Unfortunately, I don't believe I like it enough to devote the time required.