A great 4x strategy game, good for short games, or long challanges. Fantastic implementation of game ideas.
4X stands for the goals of :
eXplore eXpand eXploit eXterminate The genre pretty much defines the games premise. There is a lot to be said about this game, but I'll just write quickly the neatest concepts this game brought to the gamers world.
The first thing I liked most about this was the differences in the races. Unlike in most games, the races actually differ with realistic feeling differences. For instance, some races can traverse among the planet systems swiftly, like the Humans for instance can use "Nodes" to traverse from one planet to another, however if they dont have a "Node" to a particular star, they have to fly the long way. Another race may take a long time to travel to another star system, however they can set up "Warp Gates" to allow travel to be nearly instantaneous. Another thing I liked is that there is that there is an extensive research tree, and that each item that can be researched may or may not even show up as an available-to-research item in the next game (each game you are given random items to research, such as one game you may be able to design torpedoes, or dynamic shielding, and the next game you may not be able to design any shields at all). Also, when you are researching something, you aren't given a difinate idea when the item will be researched, only an ideal time (such as they say an item may be researched in 3 turns, but could be finished early (turn2) or later (turn4 or turn5) than scheduled.
I'd have to say there are only a few negative aspects to this. The largest problem for me was the lack of music... there are only a few songs, and they get very very repetitive in this game, the same with most 4x games, or games you would spend more than an hour at a time on. The sound effects are not quite great either, however since the concept of "Sound in Space" isn't a really plausible idea either, the sounds are still kind of chinsey. The other aspect that was hard for me to grasp at first was the battle system. While it is real time... the controls are hard to get at first, and the HUD is a bit confusing until you get the hang of it.
All in all, if you're a fan of space 4x games (Master of Orion, etc), or even the Civilization series, I would definitely recommend this game to you.