Recent reviews by Shard

There is much to love about GC4 at the time of my review (November 23). Unfortunately though I'm really struggling to give a good reason why it's more worth getting this than GC3. It feels like a re-skinned 3 with some changes rather than an entirely new game.

The Good:

- It looks gorgeous.
- It performs well.
- It's feature complete (more or less)
- The Core/Colony dynamic for settling worlds is probably the best implementation I've seen to date of an idea that existed back in MoO2.
- The station management is better than GC3
- Colony management is the best its been yet with districts & district levels.
- Shipbuilder is as strong as ever
- Style and personality intact, and the new civilisation design tools are fun.
- The sectors are an interesting design element. I like them.

The Bad:
- The UI looks great, but it's awful. Too many clicks, bad layouts, missing information or information overload, and the "outlier" is practically useless.
- Combat is awful. It's worse and less descriptive than GC2 or 3. It shouldn't need paid DLC to improve (Warlords announcement)
- Custom civ creation (stats, abilities, bonuses, etc) is very poor (like GC3). 2 was far superior.
- Resource management and bazaar UI is awful.
- Combat Cameras are awful. Far too much graphical clutter during battles make it hard to understand.
- There's currently a huge delay between on-screen and combat text (Though this has been highlighted by SD and they're working on a fix)

The Ugly:
- Starbases are still a micromanagement disaster. Less than GC3...but still awful.
- Fleet management is still a disaster. Especially refits.
- The only limiting factor to military power is money. Great in theory, but the AI just spam fleets, especially at higher levels. I was expecting to see this addressed after GC3 had the same issue but...no. At least movement is faster.
- The UI regarding fleet power is terrible, and less than useless in regards to counters without multiple clicks and tooltip hovers.
- The research tree is horrible to view/use.
- Research is cluttered with loads of useless trash that could be rolled together. Far too many +x% or -x% style research options.

I cannot remember the last time I bought a new game for £12 then sat and played it for 5 hours straight. Literally cannot remember. Especially not an FPS game, or an indie dev. Do not regret this purchase for a moment.

Does it have some rough edges? Yes. But considering it runs like butter on 10 year old hardware, who's complaining?

Scope: Epic.
Setting: Interesting.
Performance: Poor.
UI: One of the worst I've had to use in a long time.

I've been waiting for this for a long time... But unfortunately it's just a pale shadow when compared to it's predecessors.i just can't recommend this in its current state, much as I wish I could.

Edit: While I'm not yet ready to change my review, I can't say the dev team aren't hard at work fixing things. Given some more time, I am very optimistic

Honestly despite needing a little more polish and attention in some areas (which is fair enough as it's pre-release) like marketing and hardware sales, it's honestly a fiendishly addictive little game - if you're a fan of games like Game Dev Tycoon for example you'll find plenty to fall in love with here

It's not all bad. Customisation isn't bad, there's a lot of tabletop flavour and the setting is pretty well executed but the gameplay is bland and the AI is absolutely awful. It's not unusual to see an enemy ganger walk into a wall for 20 seconds then hunker down in front of it, absolutely out in the open.

If they can at least sort out the AI, there will be a gem of a game with long-term appeal here. Until then? I wouldn't recommend.

The best thing to happen to 4X games since Master of Orion 2.

Needs more polish, especially in the economy and AI areas but it's already well beyond being just an average 4X game. It's not all sunshine - there are many elements of the game that play out more like Endless Space 1.5 than Endless Space 2 (Technology, colony management) but it was still worth buying.

I found it kind of a toss-up between yes and no. A lot of it is evolution over revolution in game mechanics, which is a pity considering it's nearly 9 years since GC2.

For all that, it's still a decent game except for one massive, glaring annoyance - this game has probably the poorest resource management i've ever had to deal with in a TBS game - I wish I knew what they were thinking. It really detracts in a massive way from what is an otherwise enjoyable experience.

Multiplayer issues aside, you can say what you want - it doesn't change the fact that this is simply one of the finest games ever to have been created by the Human hand.

Entertaining, fun and occasionally somewhat disturbing (it's an 18 after all), no one compares to Rockstar when it comes to squeezing so much fun and mayhem into a single game. Are Rockstar failing to support modding? For the moment, unfortunately, yes.

Should this make you avoid what is quite simply the finest gaming experience released so far in 2015? Without a doubt, no. Is it worth buying? Absolutely.

It's rather a shame that the space-based 4X genre is so wishy-washy. So much promise and so little delivered by so many games. Master of Orion 3 and Sword of the Stars come to mind, flawed gems that could have been what we wanted (And what do we want? To conquer aliens, Naturally).

It then comes as a surprise that Endless space got so much right. Visually, aurally, and especially the interface (bar ship creation, it's average) it's done so much right. Sure, combat is lacklustre (even if the phases/cards are a novel idea), diplomacy is a little better than it's contemporaries, but it's still missing in character. You don't feel the pulse of the Universe like you can in Galactic Civilizations 2 for example.

But whatever, i'm just grousing. Hey, I didn't put over 400 hours into a game that sucked (Offline mode on my laptop didn't add the hours but I digress). It's great and worth buying! ALL HAIL OUR GLRIOUS AMOEBA OVERLORDS!