Endless Space

(Metacritic: 79%)

Summary: Nice looking game, but I failed to win on newbie...

Endless Space is one of the latest stream of indie 4x space strategy games building on the gameplay of Master of Orion 2's turn based-slider adjusting gameplay. I'm personally not a fan of such turn based strategy games due the inherent difficulty: the AI seems to know and work along an optimal path whereas you are left with either exploratory play or strategy guides.

The first disappointment was the way the tutorial is presented. No voiceover (as usual) and presented as a screenshot of the selected screen and several text bullet points to its right. Maybe if the bullet points were applied in the actual gameplay window... At first, it was a bit difficult to remember each option, but as I played, almost every screen and function felt well polished.

One thing I missed is the ability to jump to the next and previous star system from within a system view. I had to jump back to the galaxy view or open the systems from the empire view listing.

The tooltips were well placed and very informative. The technology tree was intriguing and very diverse, although it would take a very long time or very large galaxy to research every bit of it within an acceptable amount of real time.

Galaxy- and empire-wide events were good ideas, although annoying sometimes.

The AI seems to be more challenging than the difficulty settings would suggest. I've seen reports about the AI winning easily with economic victory or total points. I thought I could win by military strength, but it soon turned out to be problematic. The AI had at least 25 fleets with the strength quarter of my forces, but they were constantly pounding on each of my fleets until destruction. Early colonization and expansion is penalized by the game and it may take long time to make all kinds of planets colonizable.

The music is acceptable, although sometimes too high pitched. The graphics is okay, maybe a bit fancy on the system view. I played all my battles on auto, so no comment on the simplistic card-based battles.

Conclusion: 70%. Maybe I'll play it one day again.

Once I've finished the Beta-2 of Open Imperium Galactica, I'll try the next of such games I have purchased recently: Galactic Civilizations 2.