Far Gate

Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Review: If you like strategy games then you will probably like this. It is better than games like "Star Trek new Worlds" because you actually feel as though you are getting somewhere, albeit very slowly! I know that this game calles itself a "realtime" strategy game, but frankly, it can get boring. You get some really good ships to command and all sorts of structures. You do get a good range of views and detail on all the action, including zoom etc. I like the space warfare too, where you can command your ships to attack other ships, but frankly, there is just not enough warfare to keep me interested. I have some other complaints about it too. The first one is that you take all the time to do something that the mission states you do, like place communication satellites by worm-holes, so you lauch the ships that take SO long to get there, deploy the satellite, and then find out after another long while, that the things haven't been deployed properly. At that point, you are so bored that you can't be bothered going through all that again, and decide to save your game or not, as the case may be. A real complaint I have about it is that when you have a lot of ships and other things that you have built, the pointer you need to navigate aroung the game gets so jerky and misses out large areas in between where it lands, you will end up being incredibly frustrated, and what's more, you can end up giving the wrong commands to your bases. Like you end up pressing "destruct" rather than whatever you wanted so you end up further back in the game. I payed less than 5 dollars for this game on special offer somewhere, and at that price, I am fairly happy with what I have got. If you are thinking of buying it at any more than that, I would have to say it's not really worth it, unless your system can handle the software, or you are a real lover of long, boring "realtime" strategy games.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Review: If you like strategy games then you will probably like this. It is better than games like "Star Trek new Worlds" because you actually feel as though you are getting somewhere, albeit very slowly! I know that this game calles itself a "realtime" strategy game, but frankly, it can get boring. You get some really good ships to command and all sorts of structures. You do get a good range of views and detail on all the action, including zoom etc. I like the space warfare too, where you can command your ships to attack other ships, but frankly, there is just not enough warfare to keep me interested. I have some other complaints about it too. The first one is that you take all the time to do something that the mission states you do, like place communication satellites by worm-holes, so you lauch the ships that take SO long to get there, deploy the satellite, and then find out after another long while, that the things haven't been deployed properly. At that point, you are so bored that you can't be bothered going through all that again, and decide to save your game or not, as the case may be. A real complaint I have about it is that when you have a lot of ships and other things that you have built, the pointer you need to navigate aroung the game gets so jerky and misses out large areas in between where it lands, you will end up being incredibly frustrated, and what's more, you can end up giving the wrong commands to your bases. Like you end up pressing "destruct" rather than whatever you wanted so you end up further back in the game. I payed less than 5 dollars for this game on special offer somewhere, and at that price, I am fairly happy with what I have got. If you are thinking of buying it at any more than that, I would have to say it's not really worth it, unless your system can handle the software, or you are a real lover of long, boring "realtime" strategy games.

Rating:
Summary: Even five bucks is too much
Review: Well, in a nutshell, it's a boring game, with poorly developed interface (commands are either not present or take time to issue, especially build cancellation, queueing, and some other stuff). The graphics are pretty good, I must say, but the whole set-up seems to be rather demanding - the game would consistently crash when the maximum number of units was built. Also, the battles would often become protracted, since most units have very high miss ratio, especially many crystalline units. The races are VERY DIFFERENT, which is one of the few redeeming qualities of the game (other being price and graphics).
So, overall, you would probably do well spending your money on something else, such as ORB.