Galactic Civ 2 is a surprisingly well rounded strategy game with a lot of depth.
GC2 doesn't really take the strategy game to a whole lot of places that it hasn't been before, but it accomplishes a lot in a very polished and addictive gameplay. The game follows the basic TBS formula: research technologies, colonize new areas, conquer enemies, and partake in diplomacy. This, coupled with a very slick presentation, can easily lead to the classic "one more turn" syndrome.
While the game provides you with quite a few options to tailor the game lenth to your liking, GC2 is certainly not a short game. The first time I sat down to play, I thought I might finish a round in one sitting ala Civ 4. 10 hours later I had barely made a dent in my tech tree, and much of my galaxy was still out of reach of my ships.
The interface and graphics are very clean and polished. Everything is rendered in full 3D and fully zoomable. While the zooming seems trivial at some times, it complements another nice feature of the game very nicely, the customizable ships.
There are, quite literally, millions of possible designs for the ships that can be accomplished by attaching new discoveries to a miriad of hard points on basic hulls. This layer of the game is deep enough to add a lot of variety to the game. Despite this, it still manages to remain accessable to even the most casual player.
The tech tree in GC2 is bigger than any I have seen before. While a lot of TBS games force you to balance your research, GC2 does a good job of allowing you to pursue whichever branch of the tech tree you like and completely ignore those that you don't.
One thing that I really liked about GC2 was the hassle free options to buy and play it. if you choose, you can buy it online and download it rather quickly. It's only a few hundred mega bytes. Also the game doesn't come with any sort of copy protection, nor do you even need to have the CD in the drive to play it.
My only real hangup with the game is the sound. There's only one real audio track. While it's pretty good by itself, it gets pretty repetitive over time. The beginning of the game can be a little slow too, as the technoligies for for invading other planets take quite a few turns to develop.
All in all, Galactic Civ 2 is an adictive and satisfying strategy game with some excellent customization features. I would easily recommend it to any fan of the genre.