Rating: 
Summary: How can anyone complain?
Review: Fun game, great community, helpful staff at stardock and regular updates and now an expansion pack. It's a game with a simple premise and a challenging AI. The graphics are good enough and its clearly a game for the thinker gamer rather than a "blaster".
Rating: 
Summary: Cheap Rip-off
Review: Being a Moo fan and seeing this game, I had hopes. boy was I wrong. on the ooutside it loks like an increadible Moo ripoff, which I would not have minded. ounce you start playing however, you come to realize that there is no real hope for this game. No ship customization, no organized way of of doing combat other than "go here and kill", and for Willy's sake, you can't even play as anyone other than the stupid F***ing humans! Diplomacy you have to discover through tech reserch, even then it's so mundane it hurts. unimaginative planet design, and tedious turns. Don't get me wronge, there are a handfull of things that are decent. I dig the major and minor races, and how the minor ones just pop up out of nowhere. If you start doing evil your entire screen changes to dictate how ruthless you are. and the random anomalies that you can explore are a nice touch. All in all, it's an unimpressive game that it more bark than bite.
Rating:
Summary: How can anyone complain?
Review: If you see this game laying on the street, in a perfect, factory sealed box, with a yellow post-it note saying "Free game! Take me!" Just walk way. Even the act of bending over and picking up this game will be a waste of time. Perhaps I'm being a little facetious, but I do urge you to read all of the reviews here before considering this game. You'll find that this game's high rating has been artificially inflated by tons of glowing one and two sentence reviews, while the more in-depth reviews tend to give the game only one or two stars. To put it simply, Galactic Civilizations is not a good game. Out of the box, the game feels much more like some sort of free-download beta than a fully produced and marketed product. The game is amateurish in almost every way and borrows heavily, yet unsuccessfully from previous games such as the Master of Orion series. For instance when you complete research on a new technology you are taken to summary screen with of all things, an animated science robot - a scene lifted directly from MOO. Being a MOO knock-off would not be a bad thing in the least if Galactic Civilizations were not so seriously flawed in other areas. And flawed it is, in almost every aspect from government, to diplomacy, to ship building and combat - the game plays like nightmare version of MOO where everything looks good on the surface, but is summarily lacking any depth or even basic usability. A simple task like moving a ship from one area to another is needlessly complicated. Research is almost meaningless and offers more of just another pretty button to click than any sort of opportunity for strategy. Colonizing planets is equally maddening, where as the planets are simply reduced to a single number on the screen - higher the number, better. Perhaps most damning of all is the wretched ship combat system - of which there is none. Your ships meander around space, bump into an enemy ship and through tweets of the speaker are either dead or victorious. There is no opportunity to maneuver, upgrade, customize or really do anything with ships other than produce them with one click and watch helplessly as they are annihilated fifty turns later - long after you've already forgotten about them. After you've taken a look at the option screen and automated the more boring tasks in the game, sit back, relax and get ready to click the TURN button for the next several days. That's all there is to this game... every aspect of it is completely mundane. A bad game is one thing... and honestly, this wouldn't cause me to be so needlessly negative. After all, just because I've been playing MOO for years now and find myself jaded toward inferior products doesn't mean that some other smuck couldn't enjoy this game, right? Sure... However, a bad game that is also wracked with bugs and frequent crashes can safely be said to be enjoyable by no one using both hemispheres of their brain. Personally, I'm always skeptical of reviewers who complain about crashes and glitches. I tend to think that ninety-percent of such crashes are due to user error. But trust me on this one - this game crashes through no fault of your own. I'm a former system administrator and I maintain my multiple computers to the highest standards. I am meticulous in keeping my software and drivers updated and using quality hardware. Further, in the past six months I've played perhaps twenty different games, most of which were much more demanding on my system than Galactic Civilizations, and while a few did suffer common glitches and occasional crashes, none came close to the sheer unreliability demonstrated by GC. So the game crashes every now and then, what game doesn't, you ask. Usually when a game crashes, you just reload and resume from your most recent save. It's not that simple with Galactic Civilizations. The most frequent issue with this game is an abrupt "crash to desktop" failure - in fact, if you search the GC support forums you will find hundreds of posts regarding this issue. Confounding this problem is that your most recent "auto-save" will crash on you as well - making it impossible to resume your game! Due to this problem, I was unable to complete a singe campaign - despite trying dozens of times over the course of several weeks. The only work around I can see for this problem is manually saving your game every few minutes - an act which further degrades the already low quality of the game play experience. Often when a game experiences such a common problem the manufacturer will debug the problem and release a patch. Not so with the makers of Galactic Civilizations. Over the course of several emails with their tech support, the only solution presented was to install some spy-ware encumbered software (GC's so called "Stardock") that would some how generate an error log which I would then be required to email to them. This was unacceptable course for me and I gave up. (Indeed, to install and use this second application you have to fill out an invasive form requiring information like your age, address and other info which no one should have to give out in order to fix a broken game.) If I could get my money back for this game, I would in a heartbeat. However, I wouldn't stop there, if I could also exact some sort of humiliating revenge upon it's creators without running astray of the law I would do that also. This game is just that bad...
Rating: 
Summary: What a waste
Review: This had to be the most boring game that I have every tried to play. I spent 2 hours trying to figure it out to no avial. I feel like the reviews were written by someone who was paid (I must be missing something).
Rating:
Summary: Boring.
Review: On the plus side I'll say the game loaded and worked perfectly out of the box, which is somewhat unusual I'm afraid. On the minus side let's face it: The AI cheats. You can call it what you will but when you're inching out at 2 spaces per turn in the dark with your scout ship while the "alien races" are streaming colony ships to all the good star systems around you, the AI cheats. Like most turn-based resource games there's really nothing to DO. Move ships/Move ships/Move ships/etc. To break up the monotony you periodically select a new research topic, launch a new ship type, or pick which planet you're going to colonize or whatever. Space combat consists of a couple of icons flashing lights and making odd noises until one or the other wins. And no multiplayer mode in this day and age is downright criminal.
Rating: 
Summary: Updates Updates Updates
Review: They keep adding more and more to this game. I can't believe it a game producer that actually gives you more than you expect. Awesome game. Only thing I could hope for would be multiplayer. Buy it now!
| 
