So this is two different games in one. The first, which you have to play for the first few hours of any campaign, is an agent driven pseudo political strategy game. You play a secret agency/Illuminati type secret society to take control of nations, direct their spending and diplomacy, while upgrading your agents to protect the nations you control and trying to seize the other factions' nations. You can also investigate and try to kidnap/assassinate the other factions' agents.

That's one game, on its own that functions almost entirely independently from the other game.

The other game is a near future space combat sim, a la Children of a Dead Earth, albeit simplified (in some regards, not in others). You construct slower than light spacecraft and manage Delta V (fuel basically), Speed, armaments, and defenses in order to maintain control over your productive assets in the solar system. These assets are bases, either orbital for ship production, supply, and research bonuses, or surface bases for mining (and also some other bonuses). Control of these assets is essential to support your space fleet.

Oh yeah and theres aliens, but they kind of ignore you until you're strong enough to face them for some reason? It's not really clear why, except that maybe they're really dumb.

This game is weird, and its kind of frustrating that you are forced to play the spy/strategy game to get to the space strategy game. At a certain point once you've gotten control of the countries you need to support your space operations (USA, China, Russia, or Europe, ignore everything else) you can just set your agents to continuous missions or automatic missions and ignore them more or less. Alternatively if you like the agent focused game play, it is frustrating that you have to do Children of a Dead Earth Lite in order to progress the story and stay competitive.

This game has a lot of cool stuff, but it isn't quite sure what it's trying to be and it clearly suffers for it. It is immediately apparent that they had several different ideas for what this game should be, and instead of picking one, they just threw in everything and the kitchen sink. One of the frustrating things is you can play for several hours and not really ever get into the space combat aspect in that time, so trying it out within the refund window isn't viable. That being said, if you are here for the space combat, just go play Children of a Dead Earth, it does that much better (and without weird frustratingly slow battles). If you are here for the Illuminati strategy game though, then you can try it out within the refund window and you'll know whether you like it or not.

I've played two campaigns. I did get bored and cheat through the last 3rd or so of both, but I guess I had some fun, so maybe it was worth it for me? Definitely don't buy at full price though. Don't spend more than $20 USD on this game.

So this is two different games in one. The first, which you have to play for the first few hours of any campaign, is an agent driven pseudo political strategy game. You play a secret agency/Illuminati type secret society to take control of nations, direct their spending and diplomacy, while upgrading your agents to protect the nations you control and trying to seize the other factions' nations. You can also investigate and try to kidnap/assassinate the other factions' agents. That's one game, on its own that functions almost entirely independently from the other game. The other game is a near future space combat sim, a la Children of a Dead Earth, albeit simplified (in some regards, not in others). You construct slower than light spacecraft and manage Delta V (fuel basically), Speed, armaments, and defenses in order to maintain control over your productive assets in the solar system. These assets are bases, either orbital for ship production, supply, and research bonuses, or surface bases for mining (and also some other bonuses). Control of these assets is essential to support your space fleet. Oh yeah and theres aliens, but they kind of ignore you until you're strong enough to face them for some reason? It's not really clear why, except that maybe they're really dumb. This game is weird, and its kind of frustrating that you are forced to play the spy/strategy game to get to the space strategy game. At a certain point once you've gotten control of the countries you need to support your space operations (USA, China, Russia, or Europe, ignore everything else) you can just set your agents to continuous missions or automatic missions and ignore them more or less. Alternatively if you like the agent focused game play, it is frustrating that you have to do Children of a Dead Earth Lite in order to progress the story and stay competitive. This game has a lot of cool stuff, but it isn't quite sure what it's trying to be and it clearly suffers for it. It is immediately apparent that they had several different ideas for what this game should be, and instead of picking one, they just threw in everything and the kitchen sink. One of the frustrating things is you can play for several hours and not really ever get into the space combat aspect in that time, so trying it out within the refund window isn't viable. That being said, if you are here for the space combat, just go play Children of a Dead Earth, it does that much better (and without weird frustratingly slow battles). If you are here for the Illuminati strategy game though, then you can try it out within the refund window and you'll know whether you like it or not. I've played two campaigns. I did get bored and cheat through the last 3rd or so of both, but I guess I had some fun, so maybe it was worth it for me? Definitely don't buy at full price though. Don't spend more than $20 USD on this game.