A good game in dire need of a content pack. A must have for space fans.
Before diving into the nuances of gameplay I want to stress that this game has a lot of promise and potential, and is completely playable and enjoyable as is.
My first impressions were quite positive. The graphics are appealing, the AI seems intelligent enough and diplomacy has a colorful, tounge in cheek attitude that really works.
The races all have their distinct personalities that play out during the game. The aliens are varied between incredibly creative (mind controlling molluscs) and things that look like they were left in from the alpha phase of the game (bears in samurai suits). The diplomatic relations are quite entertaining and the AI understands when you are threatening it's borders, when your fleets are somewhere they shouldn't be, and I even got a message from an ally after destroying one of his ships about checking my weapons because they must be malfunctioning.
The UI is simple to use and generally fine as it is, though this game also suffers from the same problem as Armada 2526 did. You can zoom out almost enough to see a large enough chunk of the galaxy, but just not enough for it to be useful as a map mode. So a minimap was included that is almost as useless, since most times you will zoom out when looking for adjacent star systems, making it useful almost exclusively for holding the extra buttons for the UI on its side.
Ship design is one of the high points of the game. If you've played Space Empires it will look quite familiar. As it should because it's practically the same system. There are certain ship types and sizes for every race and you can pack them full of all sorts of parts that can be anything from weapons to fighter bays to marine barracks depending on what role you want the ship to play. The system is entertaining and easy to work with, but I found some irritating deficiencies while using it.
For starters, you have to use up every single inch of space on the ship. It just won't let you finish the design until every dark corner of your ship is filled with useless junk that you don't want to have. Granted this doesn't come up often, since on most occasions I was irritated by too little space rather that too much. That's not a problem though. Having to think about what to install and what to leave out is part of the fun.
Another thing is that while some weapons have turrets that allow you to designate the firing arcs when designing, some others are fixed and can only fire straight forward. What I don't get is why I can't just rotate the whole gun 90° before placing it and make a nice broadside? Some larger hulls have enough room for that.
You can also design fleet stances and formations in a very useful screen that lets you make a fleet using only designs of your ships and then you can order all the required ships for the fleet built at your colonies, making fleet management as streamlined as I've ever seen anywhere.
Combat is entertaining enough. Picture Distant Worlds with a much better graphics engine. Also the ships take damage to their internal systems based on where they were hit so packing the vital systems and armor plating in a logical way is actually important in ship design. I had my capital ships survive a fight more than once because I put that backup generator close to the warp engine.
The planets are well designed if not too varied. You have Terran, Oceanic, Desert, Ice, Swamp and Barren. All have two modifiers, Fertility (food) and Richness (Industry). You can designate how large chunk of the population you want working on farms or industry. On barren worlds, you'll always have to import food with freighters, but to be honest, that system didn't strike me as really functional. Having many food exporting worlds and a few importing ones, plus a whole bunch of freighters, - many of which were just idling without active missions, probably because other ships already had orders to take food to every world – the importing worlds were still often having femine because somehow the freighters just weren't working fast enough. This didn't seem to get better even when I had freighters with the best warp drives.
You also have a cashflow, but I don't really get why. I never had to use money for anything except for when I paid off some pirates. The only reason I see for it is to keep fleet sizes in check because of upkeep costs.
Research is pretty straight forward. You have a research screen where every item costs research points, which you can accumulate by having colonists work as scientists. The game doesn't prompt you if you don't have an active research going and I lost a lot of time because of it.
The techs are mostly nothing special, and there actually aren't many techs to choose from. I had everything researched halfway through a longer game.
The game boasts a feature where you can assume control of a ship and steer it wasd style and fire the weapons. It came handy sometimes for saving a big, expensive ship from enemy fire, but other than that it isn't really entertaining.
Though the game is fresh and has really nice features, I can't help feeling like the Developers released four fifths of a really good game. Some no brainer features are missing and the research tree looks like the devs just forgot about it halfway through. Also samurai bears. WTF.