Recent reviews by Lelling

Multiplayer is absolutely broken. Invites via Steam just stay "connecting to lobby" permanently and require the game to be shut down via the task manager, and if you go through the trouble of creating a Microsof XBOX Live nonsense account, you will have wasted your time because when you try to invite your friends through that, surprise - they wont even show up in the list. The only way you can set up a multiplayer lobby for your friends is by making a public lobby, but get this - there's not even a way to set up a password for a lobby, so while waiting for your friends, you'll just have to kick everyone else that tries to join. And even when your lobby is public, it's not guaranteed your friends will see it. You just have to keep recreating the lobby until they do.

With all that in mind, Microsoft support for games you bought on steam is basically nonexistent. If you want to play with your friends, this game seems more trouble than it's worth.

EDIT: Oh, and if you want to enjoy the game single-player, tough luck. The campaign missions flip from dreadfully easy to almost impossible in an instant, and some of the campaign chapters seem out of order. In random maps, even on hardest difficulty, the AI doesn't really know what it's doing and barely poses a challenge, even a to player who doesn't care about perfect strategy.

The most fun part of the game for me was being able to revisit a childhood favorite with brand new graphics, but once the novelty wore off, there was just a lot of frustration.

This is definitely one of my favorite 4X games, and a good intro to anyone who's interested in 4X games. It follows fairly simple mechanics of expansion, warfare, research, trade and diplomacy, and it's definitely the kind of game I'd recommend to anyone who likes space & 4X games :D

The races also offer a nice variety of different approaches to the game, and I've found seeking out any of the available victory conditions a very fun experience.

The soundtrack is also amazing - I use it as my work soundtrack and have probably listened to it alone more than I've played the actual game :P

It looks nice, it plays nice, it sounds nice, overall an enjoyable experience. Also, it goes on sale a lot :P

A lovely indie game, great for downtime between more challenging games / doing serious stuff. The lack of a campaign is offset by the way various features are unlocked, albeit making the game slightly reminiscent of Facebook games, and the Flash-like animations and UI aren't helping there. The concept is greater than the execution itself, but it's still very likeable. It's a fun game, lodged somewhere between "puzzle" and "god game". Would recommend.