Recent reviews by un maricón

I would love to make a joke review saying "haha funny space genocide" but in all honesty, I have a lot to say about Stellaris. I've spent 1000 hours on this game, and not once did I feel genuinely angry, annoyed, or just bad about it. The huge variety this game offers you in terms of story telling and experiences makes no playthrough necessarily more boring than the last (except for unbalanced mod origins like gigas birch world) because fundamentally the gameplay loop of Stellaris is not your main concern, but how you can modify the open ended worldbuilding already established to your own tastes. The times I've spent playing fanatical purifiers or devouring swarms, and either embracing it or creating headcanon to explain away my crimes, or the times I've gone for peacekeepers and egalitarians, quietly laughing at how many times I've been a hypocrite while playing them. Stellaris was never meant to be the most realistic interpretation of sci-fi strategy possible, certainly not with a psychic dimension full of eldritch horrors, but was meant to be how you wanted to play it, with engaging enough gameplay to keep that personal headcanon turning and turning while you did some benign action on your end, which, in real terms, impacted billions in massive ways or, at the extreme end of things, killed trillions or quadrillions in an instant. The strategy is so vastly dehumanised from the scale of reality and history to make a 4x game not a game of nations and armies but of you, your actions, your allies, your enemies, and the ultimate victory not total domination but wherever you find your story ends most fittingly, written in the stars of a galaxy that you moulded how you saw fit. 9/10, i like to see the funny purple metal number go up