Recent reviews by xrogaan

This is a neat card game. You land on the barren planet and have to terraform it. To that effect, you have a deck of cards. Each card is either a resource producing building, or an utility building. They require resources to be played, which can initially be obtained through exploration. All the while the people of mars have expectations of you, which turns into support. If you run out of support, Game Over.

This game bored me.

Not that there isn't anything to do. There is plenty to do. Yet each task feels like a job, something you have to do because you don't have any other choice. What isn't helping is the limited information given through the GUI. When you are in space, there is no comprehensive interface, at least at first glance, to tell you where the planets are and what they are. When I sit around a planet, I know there are 3 or 4 other planets around, but I can't popup a screen to plan a course. All I can do is search de visu and hit space (which is the fast drive thing). And so I sit there in my cockpit really wanting to turn my head, but I can't even do that (no VR googles). Thus I have to turn my ship in a 360° to figure out where I sit in space. This is a futuristic game, the instruments in my ship are supposed to inform me, not other other way around.

There is a galaxy map, only good to warp you out of the system.

Vertical panes on planets aren't minable or deformable, only horizontal panes. Though I do not know if you can attack the issue from the top instead of the side.

You have hydroponics, you have plants, you need a blueprint to unlock planting each plant into your hydroponics bay. How silly is that? Everything you can do is locked behind a wall, and that wall can only be brought done if you work. And so, eventually, it bored me to sleep.

Decent simciv. Logistics is a bit weird and weak, most of your time will be spent on figuring out the proper layout of your city in order to not stall on resources.

Think the expanse, but you're a belter. You have this ship that is somewhat patched together with odd stuff. Your bread earner is to mine asteroids from Saturn's rings. Physics and avidity are your worst enemies.

The game consist in you going to the rings, mine as much ore as you can, then bring it back to the station for a paycheck. You'll want to upgrade your ship if you're successful. Or even better buy a new one. There are many, many things that can go wrong while in the rings, and it'll be up to you to figure out how to handle those issues.

Nice relaxing game. The rules are relatively simple, yet the flow of each game may become unexpectedly complex. All in all, will help relax after a heavy day.

Nice game to pass time. Between resource management and tower defense, you need to defend your dome against successive waves of attacks. To succeed, you'll have to dig out resources in order to upgrade the defensive capabilities of your dome.

This is like playing legos with a little brother that constantly break the stuff you just made. You then have to innovate ways to divert your little brother's attention away, while you build your awesome castle of doom.

Nice time waster. There is no real goal other than achieving stuff and meeting the people of Pelican Town. By exploring you may gain more resources which will help you in building your own farm.

If you can ignore the annoyance of the chickens getting hammered with beer, usually leading to their early death, this game is probably one of the greatest colony management simulator.

There is a lot to say about stellaris, and I don't feel like writing thousands of words to convince you how good it is. I don't even know how to begin, as it is quite different from the other 4X existing to date.

Looking at galactic civilization 2 & 3, those two games were more about customizing your ships and less about the complexity of managing an empire. Everything is laid out in the open, leaving choice to the player for which path to take. GCiv 3 is more akin to a giant board game, with many pieces to manage. In comparison, Stellaris has a lot less stuff to handle and will actively reduce the amount of pieces the player has to take care of. You are managing an empire, you should not care about the petty lives of the general populace. Give that job to governors! Obviously, you have to content your people as they will join political factions. Some will want peace, other will be supremacists. Of course, you can promote a faction by spending political influence but that might cost you in expansion.

There is a lot of parameters in Stellaris, a lot of variables that seem innocuous at the first glance but will become important later on. The different governement ethics are diverse enough to create a true sense of diversity, to the point that you might get unlucky and be placed next to a Fanatic Purifiers kind of governement - bunch of xenophobes who will stop at nothing until the whole galaxy is purified from the xeno filth, that means you and everybody else that isn't them. That is, if they aren't the pacifist kind of xenophobes.

There are a lot to say about Stellaris, as there are a lot of parameters to take into account. Yet the management of your stellar empire is simple enough. Expect to lose the first few games though, as you are learning what not to do.

Anyhow, the first game I won started with my empire being a bunch of fanatical pacifists. Turns out there can be no more war if you are the only empire remaining. You will be peaceful, or be destroyed!

MUGANI? HAK HAK HAK!