No one has rated this review as helpful yet
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 1,170.0 hrs on record (1,047.7 hrs at review time)
Posted: Aug 6, 2016 @ 4:02am
Updated: Dec 29, 2021 @ 12:28pm

This game is so good... Too bad there are a number of issues that grate on your nerves as you try to enjoy the goodness... It's missing really basic things that will make you eventually question each minute you invest in what would otherwise be an awesome game.

- There are campaigns! Like, a real story mode in a space 4X. Awesome.
- There are numerous different unique races to play.
- Each race has its own very unique characteristics, and its own tech tree.
- The aliens are well animated, and engaging.
- The graphics are top notch.
- The immersion is real. You can roleplay this game, no problem.
- The galaxy creation has all the features you want. And you can make it tiny, or large enough to blow your mind.
- Discovery is fun!
- World building is fun!
- Empire management is both challenging and fun!
- You can design your own ships or download them (you want a Star Trek federation ship, get it off the workshop. Millenium Falcon? No problem, workshop!)
- You can design whole civilizations or download them off the workshop. Amazing.
- Late-game is not tedious micromanagement, even on the hugest maps!

BUT...
- Many little things don't work right, and it adds up. For example, between the moment when the game says "this shipyard isn't building anything" and the moment you have the right ship queued, there are often no less than *20* clicks. Do this for each shipyard, each turn. It gets old in a hurry. Many other things in the interface are broken and require a flurry of clicking when 1-2 clicks would otherwise do.
- You can't decide a path for a fleet or ship. You click and it goes. And if mid-turn you aren't sure where to go well... You will lose moves. What's a few moves in the greater scheme of things, right? Right... Except when your fleet arrives to defend your planet 2 moves too late, moves that you wasted because sometime back, the game decided that your turn was over while you still had some moves left.
- During events a screen will pop up and ask you to make decisions that will affect some aspects of your empire, without any way to check your stats before making the decision. So you are forced to decide blindly.
- The AI cheats. Blatantly. Get the most technology-favored race, and optimize all your worlds for tech. When you meet even the most tech-unfavored alien race, they will already be WAY AHEAD of you. And so on. But cheating AI is to be expected in a game of this complexity. Maybe someday when we have 100Ghz, 64-core, 256 tb RAM machines, they will be able to "think" their way to winning in a convincing fashion. But the hardware of today simply cannot do it.

CONCLUSION
This is a game with infinite customizability and modding, infinite replay value. It's a game of endless, infinite possibilities that, if you are able to fight your way through the tedious UI, will have you coming back for more and more.
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14 Comments
Horus Jun 26, 2018 @ 12:07pm 
Why does everything take 5 extra clicks for each single thing you want to do?
Horus Apr 11, 2018 @ 5:52pm 
sean.drohan It's been over 8 months and almost all of my complaints are still not fixed. They aren't huge deal-breakers each on its own, and they are UI, not core mechanics. But what good are great core mechanics if you have to fight the UI to enjoy them?
Horus Mar 6, 2018 @ 8:29pm 
I have compiled a list of what's wrong with this game. It is *HUGE*.
King Maelstrom the Esoteric Sep 4, 2016 @ 5:16pm 
Actually, GC3 felt a lot more casual to me than the last two in the series...And that's part of what I don't like about it...
Horus Sep 4, 2016 @ 4:02pm 
neron.darkiuss by "not casual" do you mean that, just like in reality, there will be situations with no possible outcome but defeat? If so, then yeah, and this is exactly my point: If the game is designed in such a way that it MAY happen that, upon creation of the galaxy, things are such that there is NO WAY YOU WILL WIN, then the game is badly designed.

Even on the highest difficulty, it should be possible for a smart, experienced, thoughtful human, basically a strategy games champion, to win. If not, the game is a failure.
King Maelstrom the Esoteric Aug 28, 2016 @ 11:22am 
This is very much how I feel.
Horus Aug 27, 2016 @ 9:34am 
I'm making a video review on this game, I will update it with a link when it's done, where I explain everything that I find is not right with this game, with the hope that the devs might address the most important of those and make the game the masterpiece it really *CAN* be.
Lu Bu Aug 27, 2016 @ 7:54am 
Most of the bad stuff I would be willing to play with, especially the decisions that impact my empire part.

But the AI thing sounds like a game breaker.
-d1m0n- Aug 27, 2016 @ 5:18am 
Well, i dont think that its too difficult to make algorythm to get all important resourses and good planets uniformly distributed over all of the galaxy.
Neron Darkiuss Aug 27, 2016 @ 4:21am 
GC3 is not casual game, if other empire has strategic resources, you must reclaim them by diplomacy, trading or military force. If you need 4x casual game with "press x to win" GC3 is not your choice.