Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Underappreciated"

I have recently begun playing this game again after having it sit on my bookshelf for almost a year. I was quite suprised that an expansion was released so I purchased and downloaded the expansion and have spent many, many hours having lots of fun with this game.

It's your standard explore, colonize, research, and then blow the heck out of your opponent type of game. There are a couple of different races to play, each with their own unique form of travel throughout space. This adds different twists and challenges to your game. I started off as the Human and have since branched off to the Tarkas. I think I will do the Zuul (the new race introduced in the expansion) next.

The technologies don't really differ from race to race, though. One interesting thing to note about the technologies, though, is that not all of them will be available to you in the game. This can be very frustrating, though you can develop technologies from the shattered hulks of your enemies, given you have the right ship available. So you can pick up missing tech. I had one seriously frustrating game where I did not have point defense in my tech tree and the computer decided to outfit all the enemy ships with missiles. Very deadly to me. I did eventually pick up the point defense and it made a big difference.

There are interesting random encounters that can occur if you choose to enable them. Mining and colony traps that can cripple or destroy your fleets when you try to mine or colonize a system. There is even a system-killer ship that will target your systems and destroy them entirely if you cannot destroy. There are others, too. This adds an extreme curveball to the game. Not only will you find yourself in a multi-front war, but then the random stuff will occur and you will find yourself totally unprepared.

I haven't played a multiplayer game, so I cannot comment on it, but the single player game is very enjoyable. Pretty soon in the game you will find yourself expanding up against the computer opponents and then all heck will break loose. It becomes a slog whereby you try to outbuild or outresearch your opponent and just hope that your strategy or tech will be enough to power you through. It can get to a tipping point, though, especially when you can research AI. Get that far, and you will know what I mean. Huge advantages after that.