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I say; “Fuck the investors – download the game instead of buying it” :-(

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It seems pretty interesting (after about an hour and a half – really not long enough to form a proper opinion on a game like this), but, despite the tutorial pop-up for every window you feel a bit lost, and the game isn’t always helpful: I was happily playing away, building scouts and colony ships, when all of a sudden my planets stopped building ships. I had no idea why. I only had about half a dozen, plenty of resources in the pool, nothing suggested any kind of fleet or ship limit, and I’d received no message explaining it that I could see. I tried everything, looked in all the different screens, and had pretty much assumed that it must be a bug, when a scout got killed. Lo and behold, the next turn one (only one) of my colony ships started building again. So there must be a unit limit of some kind – but the game never told me what it was, or that I’d hit it. A minor thing, but very frustrating and verging on gamebreaking.

Before that I was getting engrossed, though. It definitely reduces colony management in favour of empire scale, as Stromko said. Even the demo map has six hundred stars!

I think, if you can keep at it long enough to understand how the game works, you could really get into it.

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I played the demo for a few hours. Some nice ideas, but bad presentation. For a 4X game the interface is pretty simple, lots of buttons but no nesting to speak of. There’s a lot of different research categories but just a few choices in each(more are unlocked as you progress) so it’s fairly easy to digest.

You can design your own ships, though I felt it lacked sizzle. It’s no MoO 2. You just stack up components, kind of like Space Empires V but more stream-lined.

I like that there’s a fair bit of lore reading to do, every technology has a flavor paragraph, as does every minor race. Optional ‘stories’ (accessible from the News screen) add a bit of flavor text, but so far the only thing that prompted a story was finding archeological sites.

It was a bit difficult getting enough information to make informed decisions. For instance, prior to colonization each world would show how it stacked up in different ways pretty clearly through the use of different colored bars. Once colonized though, every bar became the same size making it rather hard to determine how it should be specialized.

Specializing a colony is not optional so you can’t really avoid wasting some opportunities with every planet anyway. This might make sense if you’re controlling an empire of many many planets. Early game this seemed a bit bad though, the only choice was what type of colony it was, and its priority(how fast it would develop). This left me with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs since all routes of exploration were cut off by my pacifist-yet-war-like minor race neighbors.

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Whatever is the difference.

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Heh- it’s true though, none of these games, apart from maybe the might EVE, is anyhwere near Homeworld in terms of style and artistic originality. Is it really so damn hard to make a space game not look like a million other space games? Obviously yes. It’s when you notice the absence of the elegance of games like Homeworld that you appreciate it all the more.

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The reviewer slags the game, but he does so because he apparently does not enjoy strategy games. This is a bit like having a quadruplegic review your running shoes, it seems.

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