Rating: 
Summary: Good effort that shold have been great.
Review: As a wartime strategy buff who enjoys tactical strategy based games, this one more than satisfies the appetite until the next blockbuster is released. A very good effort with above average graphics, IG2 delivers to satisfy the lure of empire building, both civilian and military style all while engulfing you in a decent campaign that keeps you going. The only thing keeping me from the big 5 star rating the continuous interuptions in the gameplay from your staff. Also the graphics get a bit choppy in the campaign mode. Dark graphics during battle scenes are also a bit annoying. But for the casual gamer and the strategic buff alike, I highly reccomend this as a good game to wet your appetite until great games like Shogun:total war, or the like come out.
Rating:
Summary: For those who like long game play....
Review: Great Game! Good Technology Tree(very important), Decent Graphics, and Long game play. However the game needs some work, if you like playing campaigns the messaging engine is very annoying. So annoying in fact I only play multiplayer (Human Vs Computer), which is very good. If you buy this game, it will consume your life for about a week....
Rating: 
Summary: Nice, but seriously flawed
Review: I bought IG2 based on reviews, and overall the game is quite nice. It has some serious flaws, however, which should have been corrected by the developers. The most serious flaw is the research system - you have to build 3 different types of research centers for the different techs, but it rapidly becomes incredibly tedious to cycle through all of your planets toggling the various research centers on and off when you want to research different classes of technology. A single research building for all the different classes would significantly decrease the meaningless micromanagement and let you focus more on the game. Another flaw for me is performance. My system is a PII 330MHz w/64MB RAM and an 8MB 3D video card. I have to play the game at the lowest resolution (VGA), and still find it incredibly slow. Especially annoying are the pauses whenever you switch screens - I get at least a 5 second pause, making the previously mentioned research center toggling triply annoying. Other 3D RTS games like Starcraft and Age of Empires II scream on my machine at their highest resolutions (SVGA), but this game makes me feel like I'm playing on a 386. Also annoying is the CD security. The game has 4 CDs - a base CD and one for each of 3 races. The annoying part is that you have to have the base CD in the drive to start the game, then swap out for another CD *every* time you play. Why not let the game start up from any of the 4 CDs? Anyway, if you can get past all these flaws, the game isn't bad. I prefer Master of Orion, though. Swapping CDs and plodding through the various screens just makes this game too painful for me to really get into.
Rating: 
Summary: This game is the middle ground of many other games
Review: I bought this game 3 days ago and already I found it a rather grave disappointment. Allow me to tell you why: -Switching between different screens (ex. research screen to starmap screen) takes 3-5 seconds. Unlike the previous reviewers, I happen to know for a fact that my hardware is more than capable of handling anything that is thrown at it. It's merely bad coding ettiquite. This is unacceptable especially in a multiplayer situation. -The research system is SLOW. It costs too much or takes too long (usually both unfortunately). On top of that, the research system only allows you to research ONE item at a time. This is extremely tedious, and makes it impossible to research most of the good items. By the time you research something you REALLY want to use, all of the planets are either in your possession or you're dead. -Star systems only have one planet per star. This is just a minor gripe, but it takes out the essence of simulating star system colonization. This also removes any possibility of one star system being more productive than another since you can terraform. -You can only play 3 races. Multiplayer allows you to have up to 8, but if you choose single player you only can pick 3. This is extremely disappointing considering each of the 8 races has unique attributes, but 63% of those attribues are gone if you decide to make it solo. -All 3 branches of research require too much attention. I feel like I'm playing Sim City trying to manage where my population is supposed to work I'd rather be handling conquering the galaxy. -Combat resembles Warcraft/C&C/Starcraft, but lacking many of the options you find in other games. Even more annoying is that you have no control over your fighters, and many advances you make in the ship research department have little or no noticable affect during battle. That's not to say the game is all that bad. The Spy feature is nice, and the plots for single player are actually entertaining. Graphics are top-notch for this genre of game (strategy), but again, at the cost of waiting 3-5 seconds between different screens. If you're into multiplayer, all of the races are very balanced and this allows you to apply many different types of strategy. But I suppose I am overly disappointed because this game lacks personality. You get hints of Starcraft, hints of Master of Orion, and occasionally a little Dark Reign here an there. Unfortunately I have yet to find anything in the game that tells me I'm playing Imerium Galactica II.
Rating:
Summary: This game is the middle ground of many other games
Review: I bought this game 3 days ago and already I found it a rather grave disappointment. Allow me to tell you why: -Switching between different screens (ex. research screen to starmap screen) takes 3-5 seconds. Unlike the previous reviewers, I happen to know for a fact that my hardware is more than capable of handling anything that is thrown at it. It's merely bad coding ettiquite. This is unacceptable especially in a multiplayer situation. -The research system is SLOW. It costs too much or takes too long (usually both unfortunately). On top of that, the research system only allows you to research ONE item at a time. This is extremely tedious, and makes it impossible to research most of the good items. By the time you research something you REALLY want to use, all of the planets are either in your possession or you're dead. -Star systems only have one planet per star. This is just a minor gripe, but it takes out the essence of simulating star system colonization. This also removes any possibility of one star system being more productive than another since you can terraform. -You can only play 3 races. Multiplayer allows you to have up to 8, but if you choose single player you only can pick 3. This is extremely disappointing considering each of the 8 races has unique attributes, but 63% of those attribues are gone if you decide to make it solo. -All 3 branches of research require too much attention. I feel like I'm playing Sim City trying to manage where my population is supposed to work I'd rather be handling conquering the galaxy. -Combat resembles Warcraft/C&C/Starcraft, but lacking many of the options you find in other games. Even more annoying is that you have no control over your fighters, and many advances you make in the ship research department have little or no noticable affect during battle. That's not to say the game is all that bad. The Spy feature is nice, and the plots for single player are actually entertaining. Graphics are top-notch for this genre of game (strategy), but again, at the cost of waiting 3-5 seconds between different screens. If you're into multiplayer, all of the races are very balanced and this allows you to apply many different types of strategy. But I suppose I am overly disappointed because this game lacks personality. You get hints of Starcraft, hints of Master of Orion, and occasionally a little Dark Reign here an there. Unfortunately I have yet to find anything in the game that tells me I'm playing Imerium Galactica II.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Game w/ a Few Minor Flaws
Review: I bought this game this weekend mainly based on the other reviews listed here and was not discouraged. Where games like Star Wars Rebellion and Star Trek - Birth of a Federation quickly dissolved into mind numbing micromanagement, this game spices things up a bit with real time planetary and space battles. The graphics are excellent and the plot of the story continually evolves and adds subtle changes or side plots for you to address. The only thing I saw that could be construed as negative was the fact that it takes and inordinate amount of time to contact other races and really get into the meat of the game. The easy level is also ridiculously easy. My advice is to skip that all together. Overall I enjoyed this game immensely and feel it will be one that I will play at will for some time
Rating:
Summary: Good- almost Great
Review: I just bought this game about a mounth ago and just now getting it to it. I the beggining there was just so much to learn, but in the end I think it helped the game. Besids being so much to learn i also thought that the unreal in the way of takeing for ever to find stars. If it were more reall you would know the position of the stars, but you wouldn't know what was there. And another good point would be if the story could follow what you where doing, not the other way around. If it would not say "o no we found anouther dam crystel of our religes beleif that it is reallllllly cooooooooollll, while im trying to stop some other epire from destroying us. all that said this is overall a pretty good game.
Rating: 
Summary: Good and Bad
Review: I like this game overall, but as you can see by the other reviews, it does have its flaws. What I liked about the game is just the mere fact that it is rather time consuming. You don't just put it in and win. You have to think and manage your planets carefully. The "normal" skill level is just way to hard to be "normal". I haven't even wanted to try to play it under "hard". Why bother when I can't even beat it under normal. I myself haven't had any problems with memory. But, I can't see a lot of the text when the starfield is on. This makes it hard to use the quick research function. The text is there, just can't read it. And it's not that I have a slow system, it's a brand new 866. I also think this game is very much like Master of Orion, just not as good. Well, maybe they will come out with another version of Master of Orion for us.
Rating:
Summary: Good and Bad
Review: I like this game overall, but as you can see by the other reviews, it does have its flaws. What I liked about the game is just the mere fact that it is rather time consuming. You don't just put it in and win. You have to think and manage your planets carefully. The "normal" skill level is just way to hard to be "normal". I haven't even wanted to try to play it under "hard". Why bother when I can't even beat it under normal. I myself haven't had any problems with memory. But, I can't see a lot of the text when the starfield is on. This makes it hard to use the quick research function. The text is there, just can't read it. And it's not that I have a slow system, it's a brand new 866. I also think this game is very much like Master of Orion, just not as good. Well, maybe they will come out with another version of Master of Orion for us.
Rating:
Summary: A good, but broken game.
Review: I play a great many strategy games and I consider myself to be a fairly decent player, though not great by any means. On the one hand, I truly enjoy playing IG2. The mechanisms of planet building and support, the ship design, the research tree, and the general interface are all excellent and make the game a pleasure to play. Or would if the difficulties (easy, normal, hard) were actually indicative of anything. When I play a game on easy, I expect to learn how to play and very likely win on my first try. In IG2, the easy was so easy, I won before I really felt I had a handle on the game. Normal level should be a challenge. I should need to play well, and in the end, I should still only win about half the time. I've lost count of how many times on "normal" (as the Solarians) I have not even come close to winning. I get wiped out every time by a Kra'Hen fleet so large I can't even conceive of what I would need to do to make one half its size. Sometimes I die even sooner. Goodness forbid that I even try to play on "hard" difficulty. For any normal game, I have come to expect that the "hard" difficulty to really be "nearly impossible". In IG2, normal mode does this, and I feel the game is hardly worth the trouble as a result. I have tried as the Shinarians as well, with similar results. In conclusion, while I truly liked the game architecture, I cannot recommend this to anyone. I found this to be one of the most frustrating games I have played in quite some time.
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