To all turn-based strategy, 4x lovers (such as myself), I highly recommend this game. It's the best thing out before the release of Sid Meier's: Beyond Earth.

Anyone who is wondering what this game is like, I'll give you a brief idea on what it is like by saying that it feels like Civilization V with a few major differences, such as:

1. Random tech trees for each faction - you also discover new technologies after every era you pass through, to give a sense of wonder of the future

2. Unit stacks - infinite number of units per tile; like Civilization IV's stacks of death. The game has actually balanced it so that attacking with stacks is less beneficial; bombardments hurt all units within a stack, flanking (putting units next to each other in separate tiles) gives an attack/defensive bonus.

3. Customisable units - yes, you have a unit workshop and can fit different weapons/bonuses/abilities on them. There are a lot of different chassis to research (e.g. infantry, fast-attack vehicle, tank, watercraft, and more).

4. Planet wildlife - at the beginning of the game, they are not hostile. However, the wildlife can get more and more aggressive if factions fight against them, or produce a lot of pollution. They may then become the equivalant of barbarians, or even worse (if aggressive enough, they can launch a full-scale invasion on humans, threatening everyone. It could prove to be a good tactic, for militaristic players, to annoy the local wildlife so that peaceful players are threatened with annihilation). There are multiple types of wildlife, ranging from practically harmless little xenomorph drones to gigantic aquatic monstrosities.

5. City management - it works something like this; morale (happiness) is local, rather than national. Local morale has an affect on local growth, and local growth depends on whether or not you have enough food stockpiled (food pool is national). Growth is also affected by habitable space; if you don't have enough space, migration to other cities (ones which have more habitable space) will occur. Production requires minerals (also stockpiled nationally). If you run out of minerals, production will be hindered but not stopped completely. Science is gathered normally (1 scientist = +1 science). There are buildings, natural resources and tile improvements which produce percentage increases and/or a small increase in that stat. You can also move your citizen's roles (there are four roles; farmer (food resource collector), miner (mineral resource collector), worker (city producer) and scientist (science producer)) around manually, and they will automatically go to the highest yielding tile. There are other factors as well (such as wars, pollution etc), but that's just the gist of it.

6. Alien invasion - around turn 200 (normal pace), an alien force (size depends on how difficult you set difficulty level/alien aggression level) invades the planet and the world has to rally together to fight them off. It's a nice twist and a breath of fresh air, especially if the local wildlife is almost extinct by that time or if you have been playing a peaceful game up until that time.

In addition, the game's presentation is very nice (introduction video, graphics, artwork, quote voice overs), soundtrack is great, UI is intuitive and smooth, optimisation is smooth as well; never lags or crashes (runs a lot better than Civilization V). The game is, amazingly, roughly 500MB, so it's a very fast download.

What can I say which is bad about the game? Well, currently, the game has more focus on combat than Civilization. The game still needs, in my opinion, to add more content which aligns the player to a more non-combat style of gameplay (e.g. something similar to culture with wonders). There are multiple victory conditions other than conquest, such as economic and research victories, but it'd be nice to have more. There is also no indication of how far ahead you are when compared with your opponents, until the last few turns before your, or your opponent's, imminent victory, warning the player.

The good news is that the developers have pledged to add more content to Pandora: First Contact, maybe in the form of expansions, if it proves to be successful. So far I think the game has been successful, hence the Steam release (the game was released months before Steam).

EDIT (7th August 2014): Just as I said before, they have continued updating the game to make it better and they have recently announced the first expansion pack, "Pandora: Eclipse of Nashira", to the game which adds espionage, better diplomacy, better aquatic gameplay (sea tile improvements etc), new factions and more.

For people hoping this to be the next Alpha Centauri, I wouldn't get your hopes too high. The game is good, and it is very similar to AC in some respects, but it's not exactly the same (e.g. no mind worms). Judge it for what it is. I played a lot of AC back in the day, and I thoroughly enjoy this game for what it is.

If you're still not convinced, or somewhat unsure whether or not to pay for the full price of £22 or $36, just wait for the eventual sale. I'd definitely call you mad for not getting it then.

I highly recommend this game to any and all strategists.

So, for anyone considering this game i would like to point out a few things:

Game play:
+ Easy to learn, hard to master.
+ Lots of micro-managements. (Food, Pollution, Moral etc)
+ Decentralized resource management.
+ Unit Stacking. - Unit management similar to Civ IV.
+ Offers Customisable unit.
+ Random tech tree.
+ Decent AI.
+/- No campaign or scenario-mode. - Not really needed in my opinion.
+/- Seven playable factions. (One faction from DLC) - Each faction features unique skills and play-styles, but no unique building or technology.
- limited number of factions per map. - Only seven factions on huge map.
- No Asynchronous Multiplayer.

The atmosphere and graphics:
+ An excellent UI. - Simple, clear and readable fonts on wide range of screen sizes in any devices.
+ Good texture quality.
+ Beautiful landscape.
+ Atmospheric cutscenes.
+ Great music and sound.

Performance:
+ Literally awesome. - Running pretty well and smooth, even on huge maps on a mid-range PC.
+ Stable.
+ Almost bug free.

Additional:
+ Linux and Mac version.
+ Steam cloud.
+ Moddable.

I can't really find fault with the game. Anyway the weakest point is AI.

Pandora tries to be a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, but it doesn't -quite- hit the mark. That isn't to say it's bad, in fact in some ways it can be quite charming. It's also a perfectly good alternative to Beyond Earth until that title drops in price to something a little more reasonable for what essentially amounts to expansion content.

If you've played Civ 5, you've more or less played Pandora. There are some striking differences - the non-linear tech tree, the ability to give units custom loadouts, alien hives, and the arrival of a "doomsday" army in mid-late game. It does these things well (Although BE's tech web sounds more impressive), and if you're trying to choose between Beyond Earth or Pandora, I would advise you to wait until Pandora goes on sale and then pick it up first. It isn't good enough to be worth the full price of $33.00 CAD, but it's well worth purchasing all the same.

I found the AI to certainly be smarter and much more aggressive than its history-based counterpart from Firaxis, and the couple of games I've played felt like they moved at a much quicker pace. This is a good and a bad thing. For those players that enjoy almost constant conflict and a push to pretty much wipe the board early or be wiped, this is for you. For those players that prefer a slower Civ-style pace, you're going to be a little frustrated with the way the AI seems to blatantly rush through the game in -every- regard. My first match lasted only 50 turns before my AI neighbor wiped me out with tier 3 units while I was still clearing hives and building up my third city just trying to keep my income positive. In the 7.5 hours I've played, I've had 4 games - 3 lost and one win, all on small maps. I have one game that's been sitting unfinished for a couple months, but thats mostly due to other distractions.

In a show of fixing what should have never been "fixed" by Firaxis in the first place, Pandora does away with the silly one-unit-per-tile rule of the current Civ gen, including Beyond Earth. Yes, unit stacking is back. And it is fantastic. The "Training" feature that levels up your units was also a very welcome addition, and something that can keep your low-grade units competitive for a little while longer when resources are tight. Graphically, Pandora does pretty well. It's nothing outstanding, but it still looks quite good, and could pass as a product from a much larger studio if compared. Unit animations are nice and fluid, the sound quality is quite good, and the alien species have quite a nice amount of diversity. They're also quite difficult, and some of the larger species will continue to be a hassle for your units until about tier 3 weapons and tech.

The factions all feel reasonably distinct, but there was room for the developer to do a lot more too. The bonuses are nice, and give the factions a different feel when it comes to gameplay, but visually they're all homogenous. This is very disappointing, as even Civ 5 and the latter Beyond Earth allowed for numerous visual styles. This is something that could easily be remedied with a community mod, but the developer has yet to offer any workshop support and the modding community is terribly slow to grow. I'm no modder myself, but this usually indicates that the game is not all that friendly towards customization. There's also no map editor at the present, so if you were hoping to recreate the alien infested Earth from TV's Defiance, or KSP's Kerbin, you're unfortunately out of luck. Both of these things should require developer attention and soon, as they severely limit the game's appeal.

6.5/10

All in all, Pandora does an okay job at presenting a decent sci-fi 4x reminiscent of SMAC, but just an okay job. It gets some things right, but it's also missing a lot of things that should be there already. The seeming lack of mod support and a community around it and no official map editor costs the game some serious points. If it had those two, I could probably toss it an 8 or 8.5, but as it stands it lacks two crucial features. That said, It's well worth picking up if it's on sale. But I wouldn't advise paying full price for what you get. Then again, it's still quite reasonable compared to the tag on Beyond Earth.

A decent library addition for any fan of sci-fi or 4x games.

I love games like this. Well, I love games like this when they don't have massive problems. Pandora: First Contact is marred by two things as far as I'm concerned, though both of them are kinda the same thing - the enemy AI. I say enemy AI because that's what it is. Unless you jump through a mass of hoops and play in an incredibly specific way and don't let population get higher or lower than that little gap between X and Y and don't let your cash reserves do the same, or your armed forces power level, or the amount of land you have, or the improvements, or the... you get the idea, right? Long story short, it's next to impossible to keep the AI controlling the other factions happy, and when it isn't happy it becomes schitzophrenic. One turn it hates you but wants an alliance, the next turn it loves you but is denouncing you and cancelling all your treaties. It must have been incredibly hard to code an AI worse than the one in Civ 5, but they did it.

The second problem with the AI is just how utterly it cheats. I'm honestly not sure that they didn't tag the difficulty levels backwards. To test just how bad it is I started a game on the lowest, easiest difficulty level and a couple hundred turns in I'd colonised and developed the continent I was on and the the enemy factions in their two or three tiny little cities were still totally, utterly eclipsing me in reasearch to the point where they were fielding units two or three tech levels above what I had available. This is with the entire research output of about ten massive cities crammed with scientists and it was being completely outmatched by two or three crappy little cities with maybe one or two tiles upgraded around them. I literally had more scientists than any two factions had population and they were still outresearching me!

If these are ever fixed, this will be a nice little game. Right now though, it's just too frustrating to play.


Edit: Okay, a tiny bit late adding this but not too long ago a big patch was released that was the dev's basically going 'yeah, we made the AI a cheating pack of superpowered madmen/women and we got tired of the complaints so here's us fixing it'. I haven't gotten around to trying it yet, but it does claim to solve a fair few of the complaints I have.

Surprisingly better than Civ beyond Earth in many ways. Get them both.
The world feels a lot more alien than Civ BE and this is a good thing.
Random tech tree.
Hostile Aliens.
Alien Invasion
Eclispe brings out some nasties.
Diplomacy lacking but useable. Still better than Civ BE trade hubs.
Recommend.

Some people call this game Civ in space. It is not the first game to recieve this nickname, nor will it be the last. At its simplest, Pandora is a 4x strategy game that very closely resembles the Civilization franchise. What it truly is, however, is a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri (the true 'Civ in space'). This game looks and feels like Alpha Centauri down from its visuals to its alien threats to having to deal with hazardous space fungus.

And so, what we have here is an alternative to Civ: Beyond Earth. Think of Pandora as a baseline which C:BE must surpass. Because if the TRUE successor to Alpha Centauri cannot defeat the spiritual successor, a lot of people will be disappointed. And whereas it is not without its flaws (limited number of factions, a single visual style for all factions), Pandora: First Contact is a solid, enjoyable game. I'd recommend it to anyone looking for something to play whilst waiting for the release of Beyond Earth. And if Beyond Earth turns out to be a flop, Pandora is there to take its place.

I heartily recommend.

I will preface this by saying that the game has promise. However, that promise does not compensate for Pandora's failings.

Pros:
1. The game world is beautiful and interesting to look at.
2. There is a randomized tech tree that jumbles up the techs. This allows replayability as no two games will have the same tech trees.

Cons:
1. Because the tech tree is randomized, the randomness could seriously gimp a game as there are a lot of inferior techs in Pandora. Sometimes the player will have a lot of great techs on the way up the tree until the tech they are trying to attain. However, sometimes that same tech will have completely inferior precursors. It's all luck... which can screw with gameplay.
2. Native life: This ruins the game. First, even though a player may have alien life aggression set to very rarely, built the Xenobiology project (-25% alien aggression), did not attack one of the aliens at all, and are the Gaian faction (even more alien aggression reduction), random event of increased alien aggression overrides it all and they will attack. It's completely ludicrous and needs to be removed from the game.
3. The AI is oversimplistic. Essentially, military power = godhood. That's the only thing they look at. If the player has more power than the AI, then they're friendly. If the player has less, then they become more demanding. This functions mainly with the military and faith-based faction which are far mor warmongering. However, it's still within the rest of the factions' coding and if the player loses a lot of military power from, lets say the ludicrous alien swarm random event, then even the most peaceful factions (Gaian) will start demanding or declaring war. It's bad game design.
4. The spying in this game is completely broken. First, there's no inherent city defense against spy units. So, a player has to actively keep military units in either chokepoints or totally around a city to prevent spies from even touching the city. Second, they are extremely overpowered in what they can do. Steal or destroy a majority if not all of a faction's credits and research, cause massive unrest, destroy buildings and production, and even set off nukes. The only contributing factor is the percentage chance the spy will succeed in the specific sabotage which is dictated by their veterancy. It's completely broken.
5. From what I've read, everything I listed above will not be fixed by the devs as the devs have already moved on to other projects. So sad as if the problems would be fixed, then the game would be a lot better.

It's a mess and I would avoid it in it's current form.

I wish I could give this game more thumbs up. It is simply amazing.

The UI is so good it's nearly transparent. You always have access to the information you need. The busy-work is stripped out, and you're left with only the fun, meaningful decisions. Also, for the first time that I can remember, they do unit upgrades correctly. The starting units can be meaningful and useful in the end game, if you keep them upgraded with the latest tech.

I've been playing turn-based strategy games a long time, and they always end up playing the same way. I was just looking for a graphics update out of this game, but it actually changed the formula for me enough that I had to change my playstyle to adapt to the game. That's brilliant - it feels new and fresh rather than just another rehash of the old, stale status quo.

I think the addition of a truly dangerous PvE component really spices up the game. You've got to adapt to the situation. The randomized tech tree paths also help ensure that each game has its own unique story - it sounds weird, but it works.

I highly recommend this game. It's a serious contender for my game-of-the-year pick.

I've finally played enough that I think I owe this a review.

Pandora's very clearly inspired by Alpha Centauri, but the underlying mechanics are quite innovative and different. At core this game is about super specializing your cities, micromanaging the population in your cities, and fighting the other factions. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really *tell* you how to manage your population or make the interface intuitive to focus around it. At best, it offers 'lock buttons' on population types. The combat is so-called multiple unit per tile, which removes some of the problems of Civ's one unit per tile.

The game falls down badly in diplomacy, where the AI seems to essentially perform a force count comparison to decide whether to attack. Get behind in military force and you'll suddenly find yourself under attack. Lose or even have a few units weakened in the skirmish and suddenly the other AI will all decide to join the fray and you might as well restart. The tension, of course, is if you're building tons of military to avoid the AI pile-on, you aren't shotgunning ahead in science.

In combat, the AI seems to be decently competent, although late in the game they build tons of lower-tech units as opposed to higher tech ones. They will brutally shell your cities with artillery and destroy modifier tiles. The guy who rewrote the AI deserves a pat on the back for the challenge they offer in combat.

As for personality, Pandora doesn't have any wonders or memorable personalities like Civ's Montezuma and Ghandi, just the brutal optimization game of managing your population and keeping up your military. The game's systems are too brittle to allow for casual play. If you're not carefully optimizing everything from the beginning, then you're not going to have fun. This game was a missed opportunity. Civ needed some competition or at least someone doing something new and different. This isn't it.

Pandora: First contact is basically a modern version of Alpha Centauri on a hex grid, as opposed to Civilization Beyond Earth, which is essentially Civ 5 in space. Like AC, Pandora includes unit customization, terraforming, randomized tech trees and factions with distinct leaders and philosophies alongside a rich backstory and a detailed compendium. In addition to this, varied alien aggression and several alien-related events can easily disrupt the balance of power in a game, forcing players to react to new threats and even form tenuous alliances to overcome them. While the game only includes a few unit chassis (infantry, light vehicles, tanks, aircraft, mechs and dreadnoughts), each of these unit types can fill different roles with the wide range of weapons and specialized equipment available - it's not uncommon to find yourself with 3 different types of tanks, for instance. Lastly, the problem of "death stacks" isn't as large as it is in games like Civilization 4, as features such as orbital bombardment and artillery can damage entire unit stacks, punishing this strategy.

The only complaint I have at the time of writing this review is that the espionage system is too powerful in the hands of the player; it's possible, using two spies, to completely prevent an AI player from researching technologies and amassing wealth - while the AI is capable of using this same strategy (and they try), a human player will likely counteract this by positioning units around cities while an AI player won't.