Burned Land
Burned Land is a niche game, and a little gem to me.
At first sight it might seem a little bit empty and obscure. Then it will seem very hard, even unfair. But if you push forward, you will discover a game with a very original approach, very rich and permissive in the ways you want to shape your kingdom and face the gods.
In this game, you not only build units and facilities, you will also “monitor” your population (literacy, devotion, nobility, sedentary, etc.), so they will provide you what you need and when you need it.
– Real player with 31.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Indie Games.
It is a pretty rough game, both in terms of UI and difficulty. The UI will hopefully get some polish from this one-man dev team, and perhaps the difficulty as well, but the difficulty certainly needs the polish a lot less. The dev is still pushing out regular updates, thus my recommendation for this Early Access game.
I made it to Turn 194, after narrowly dodging a very early game defeat. The early game near-defeat came about as my village almost starved due to a famine brought on by the gods. The entire point of this game is that the larger you grow, the more interest the gods have in stopping you from growing.
– Real player with 24.6 hrs in game
Sword of the Stars II: Enhanced Edition
Recommended? Sort of.
I bought this at a steep discount years ago (less than 10 bucks), and have alternately loved and hated it ever since.
The game was originally released in a mid-alpha state, resulting in a lot of the rage evidenced in some reviews. After a free expansion, about 50 mid-sized patches and over a hundred micro-patches, what you have is basically a game in permanent mid-beta.
Most of what could be fixed without a complete redesign has been. What remains is an extremely time-consuming, mostly rewarding game that will occasionally infuriate you.
– Real player with 2953.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
3/24/2014
I currently have over 1,000hours in this game.
Here a list of things within the game on a scale of 1-10
Individual race design- 8/10 (each race still feels completely unique and fresh like they did in the first game)
Artificial Intelligent race design- 10/10 (this was actually done flawlessly and very unique compared to
other artificial intelligent races created in the same and even other sci-fi genres. It’s a very fresh new look on AI playable races)
Story- 2/10 (there is no story, other than the lore you get from either the forums or within the encyclopedia their really nothing else.)
– Real player with 1290.7 hrs in game
The Battle of Polytopia
I would like to begin with the disclaimer that I received Polytopia for free as I had the privilege of beta-testing it before its Steam release. However, I do not believe that this influences my view of the game in any major way that would impact my review. I also had prior experience with the game in its mobile form prior to its release on Steam.
Polytopia is simply a brilliant game. Midjiwan created a masterpiece that is continually refreshing and new, yet challenging to master. The AI is just punishing enough on higher difficulties to encourage thoughtful and deliberate gameplay, yet lenient enough to reward clever strategic moves. At no point have I felt like the game was too arbitrarily challenging or easy, instead it has consistently maintained a delicate balance in terms of difficulty (unless you happen to be stranded on a 1x1 island with no resources in sight, which although rare, is quite tragic). The game is also super approachable for beginners without much experience in this type of strategy/resource management genre. I think that honestly anyone from any skill level can thoroughly enjoy Polytopia.
– Real player with 52.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
I really do recommend this game after playing for about 11 hours. It’s the first time I play a game like this, but to my understanding it’s quite a lot like Civilisation but much simpler (and cheaper). Like all games, there are both good and bad things to this game. Let’s discuss it.
Firstly, I’d like to adress the negatives. Multiplayer mode is not that fun, in my opinion. Pass & Play works if there are two of you, but even then it’s a little tiresome to wait for your turn. I tried playing with 2 friends and it just took way too long. I haven’t tried online multiplayer because I don’t know anyone who owns this game. You can play with strangers as well, but the waiting time to fill a server is too much. That’s not really the game’s fault though, that’s just because not enough people have bought this game yet since it’s new.
– Real player with 28.7 hrs in game
Jon Shafer’s At the Gates
So I really, really tried to like this game. I had read a few mixed reviews and the game has been more or less available to the public for over a year as of the time of this writing; however, I decided to give it a real attempt.
What’s good?? What I thought would be interesting game play is actually just that…interesting (in a good way). In CIV, you essentially move pops around to hexes and they work the fields. Drag/drop mindless bore and I stopped playing CIV 2 versions ago because the franchise is too shallow in that way. In AtG the Discipline/Profession mechanic adds a layer of complexity to something that is very glossed over in CIV…how to prop up an economy and a balanced society. This part of the game is very fun, and challenging and requires some thought and chess play of your opening and mid game moves.
– Real player with 61.7 hrs in game
This is a game that should really have two reviews.
Version 1.0 as released last week is one thing - it’s solidly OK for a couple of playthroughs. The potential of the game overall is much greater, and something refreshingly different in the genre.
Nomadic Start - The game opens with you playing as a group of nomads, scouring your environs for the resources you need to survive and begin building a civilization. Resources not at your starting location? Barbarians plaguing you? Too close to another tribe’s settlement area? Move it! This is pretty cool and doesn’t set you back the way it would in other 4Xs. While you’re in this phase, your population will actually consume the resources on the land, eventually permanently exhausting the deposit.
– Real player with 38.1 hrs in game
Pandora: First Contact
This is a solid game in its niche marked of 4x games, and more specifically, 4x games with space age human colonization. With its only direct competitor being the blatant AAA cash-in Civ: Beyond Earth, it is clear that this dev does not have much to compete against.
Let’s start with the bad, because everyone else starts with the good, and I’m a unique and interesting individual, as well as a special snowflake, so I go out of my way to be different in ways that try to be clever but miss the mark entirely.
– Real player with 245.6 hrs in game
A great 4X game, what I used to cure down my hype in waiting for the release of Beyond Earth.
Although the game has quite a steep learning, REALLY took me alot of playthroughs and restarts (“rage quits” you might call them) to get things going right in the game (e.g. Prioritizing the wrong things).
TL:DR;
Like it or not, Military is VERY IMPORTANT in the game; you arrive on this new planet, Pandora; peaceful at first (depending on your alien agression difficulty), but eventually the planet will become very hostile towards you (and other factions). Aliens (Native Wildlife) in the game behaves similarly to Barbarians in Civ, their main purpose is to cause trouble and possibly wreck havoc in your new cities (with the exception that Aliens can actually raze entire cities in a turn). However, Barbarians will always attack you, but their not that strong, usually a good combination of 2-3 units can deal with most of those issues. But for Aliens, they won’t attack you right from the start (that’s why exploration is safe and actually a necessity); but when they do, they can be really troublesome; barbarians quite often invade in individuals, but aliens invade in large groups. Have a bad military and your city is prone to destruction. Other more powerful aliens (e.g. Galeths, Aspidochs) attack you much later in the game, prioritize the right things (e.g. research on weps) and you can deal with them (with the lost of a few units in some cases); otherwise be prepared to lose a few cities. Keep playing longer, then there’s a third type of alien invasion that can even be more of an issue for unprepared factions (having little military), but I’ll leave it for you to discover.
– Real player with 92.3 hrs in game
Space Empires V
Space Empires V is an unpollished diamond. You just know that if it had a reasonable length of time in development to remove all the bugs and add a proper multiplayer experience, then it would have been unsurpassed in the 4X genre. What saved this game in my view is just how easy it is to mod. All parameters are contained in .txt files so you can alter anything. Adding mods is incredibly simple(no installers, just download mod folder into a folder in the game). Personally I play with the balance mod(makes intelligence probability based, balances the game, makes AI terrifying) and have tweaked things like the battle timer for ground battles.
– Real player with 410.6 hrs in game
When you look at the hundreds of hours of playtime I have on this game, an important thing to know is that I have thousands of hours on the DRM free version. This game has to be my hands down favorite 4X game so far, rivaled only by Galactic Civilizations. This is one of the most detailed games I’ve seen, and is wonderfully robust in its options.
This game has everything from destroying planets to creating ring worlds to designing your own ships to the most in depth diplomacy options I’ve ever seen.
– Real player with 231.4 hrs in game
Sword of the Stars: Complete Collection
- I almost didn’t buy this game because the trailer is awful. I came to check it out because I’d read about it on forums when I was specifically looking for a 4X game with good space combat.
-I found the top notch space combat but almost walked away from the game 15H in due to the lack of tooltips and tutorial which had no idea how to actually tutor.
-After looking things up online and reading forums etc. on the game I started to really, really enjoy it.
What you have here is a game that at its core is actually an excellent game. It had the best space combat out of any 4X by FAR, and better combat in terms of controlling a group of units than any other game I’ve played. I love the interactions of the technologies on the ships and the way that every shot is individually calculated.
– Real player with 331.4 hrs in game
Get this instead of its sequel which is a buggy unfinished mess where they tried new things that impede game flow while seeming cool. This one remains simple yet complex to master. No other game I own does what this game does:
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Six actually unique factions.
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Ship design that’s fun yet matters. Pick from variations of the drive (aft), mission (mid) and control (fore) sections of a ship and put weapons down, select what modifiers you researched (e.g. armour, drive enhancements), Give it a name and your good to go.
– Real player with 328.9 hrs in game
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
This is my favorite game since it came out, and my favorite version of Civ (I know Civ 1 through 5)
I won’t go into what Civ is specifically about. You should know.
Nor will I compare to other Civ games. It has been done.
This versions' depth is impressive, and the playability is… at least a few lifetimes.
Graphics are normal, but totally irrelevant!
The 4X strategy design and many (but not too many) balanced options make it something that will always be enjoyable.
Spock will still read your Scientific discoveries out loud! :P
– Real player with 1974.8 hrs in game
I’ll start by saying that this is not a game for casuals, if you want to have a game that is incredibly compelling and complex and rewarding to learn, this is your game. While Civ 3 remains a complete mystery to me, I can say I have played all the others, and this one is by far the best I’ve played. You might say “what about Civ 5?”, but I highly prefer it to Civ 5 for several reasons (unit stacking Figure out how to use collateral damage people, tech/espionage/culture slider, much more micromanagable empire, better system for unit and city maintenance, far superior espionage system, more interesting promotion dynamics with military units, unrestricted leaders, non gimmicky leader traits, non gimmicky religions, far superior map options, way less annoying barbarians, way less buggy multiplayer, etc etc etc…)
– Real player with 1765.2 hrs in game
Civilization IV®: Warlords
I’ve enjoyed this episode the most, usually playing the Terra map in order to be able to expand first into an unclaimed territory.
The ability to modify the game text by editing XML has been fun – part of the enjoyment in both Civ II and Civ IV for me has been editing the resources.
On my platform (Win 7/2.8GHz HP home PC/8 MB RAM), the UI alternates between snappy and very slow. After a while (presumably a memory garbage collection) it gets fast again. Using some of the shortcuts like right-click to move makes the slow-down bearable.
– Real player with 5678.9 hrs in game
This version has a good balance of factors. The economy enables everything of course, but you can take territory with guns or culture, and any of the victory methods is achievable.
Mostly I win either by dominance, or by culture, or by winning the space race. Econ victory is a grind but I have never tried to optimise it.
Funny thing: I took out the French with culture once. I just squeezed them right off the edge of the continent. Never fired a bullet at them. Even their capital revolted and joined my civilization.
– Real player with 2885.1 hrs in game
Distant Worlds: Universe
This game should be fun, it looks like great fun and will lead you to expect that true enjoyment is just around the corner. However the fun you are anticipating will always be just beyond your fingertips until you finally get fed up and learn to stop trying, because in the end, there really isn’t any, just frustration at how this game could of been awesome.
1. The Crashes: This game crashes a lot, but only starts doing so after you have invested so much time into your save that you’re faced with abandoning an empire you have spent hours cultivating, or routinely losing 20-30 mins of progress or more depending on how long you set your autosaves to be. You may think the solution is to make autosaves more frequent, but once your game get’s to that point, it’s now taking 5+ minutes to save your game every time. If you can mke it to some real endgame points where you really are invested and theres multiple large, well developed empires that can truly challenge you, prepare for that to take even longer. Even better, reloading saves seems to randomly reset the enemy AI in certain ways that are difficult to immediately decipher but will become apparent eventually. For example, one game I manage to start getting friendly with a lot of empires that I had been trying to open free trade agreements with and suddenly they sort of cascade to where I want them to be, one after the other. Ok, not sure why but cool. Whoops, game crashed, reload autosave. Now all of a sudden, even though I followed the same actions I did last time, they’re all imposing trade sanctions and moving to war decing. Cool.
– Real player with 564.9 hrs in game
An incredibly deep and rewarding game which has some of the deepest and advanced AI you may ever witness in a game, especially one of this scope. It’s clear the developers focused near purely on content over most other things for this game and unfortunately that comes at the cost of having a game that’s imposes a significant learning curve. Getting to grips with the UI will be a difficult romp, and the mass amount of options given to you will both satisfy veteran 4X players and discourage most beginners.
– Real player with 463.9 hrs in game