If i believed in giving a perfect score this would be it.
Master of Orion 2 (MOO2) battle at Antares: an incredible sequel of a terrible game. When the first Master of orion was launched the game was considered mediocre, how right they were, luckily MOO2 is all a sequel should be, bigger, better, more... in just about everyhing, options, graphics, gameplay, sound everything.
This game is all too similar to the wildly popular Sid Meier´s civilization games, only with a small twist, and thats the fact thats in space, like the civilization games there is no plot and there are no "real" characters, there are simply civilizations that take their first steps in an uknown region, and from there on they must survive, build, research, expand, and eventually comunicate, trade, spy, and declare war on each other.
There are 3 ways to sucessfully finish the game, you may destroy every other civilization in the game, be elected as thel leader of a league formed by all of the civilizations or destroy the antares civilization, a species that are superior in just about everything to all of the other races, you can not trade with them, or declare truce, they will atack every other race at random with their superior firepower, making a hard task to simply survive.
Another strong point of this game its the management of your empire, you must expand them to new worlds, unfortunantly not all are as habitable as others, so some colonys maybe depend on other for food, but, in turn they might be in a planet with vast number of resources, or it may be a large plannet which you could use to become a giant research or manufacturing complex, also you design you own blueprint of each ship type, deciding what type and how many weapons do you want, or if you want it to have some sort of speciall abilitys like invisibility or tractor beams The game also has random events which may deter or empower you, such as discovering ore mines and major research breaktroughs or earthquakes, plagues, and even some nice sabotage from your enemies.
Both the sound and graphics were quite good for its time, it featured nice FMV´s for several events in the game, and the aliens were nicely drawn for its time, the music of the game is a soothing one that applies quite well to the theme of the game, and it play a diferent music for each race you come in contact with.
There is however one problem with the game, and that is that it has so many options that in turn it generates a steep lurning curve, luckily with the press of the right mouse button you get a small message saying what does that particular option do.
Overall its a great game that has aged gracefully and it would be perfect if not the steep lurning curve