Reach for the Stars

Rating:
Summary: Buggy and boring
Review: I was really looking forward to this game. I remember the first Reach for the Stars and how much I love the game, and I find it truly depressing that it's image has been tarnished with this title. The game crashes repeatedly, has image glitches, and scratchy sound. The technology tree is almost pointless since the technologies of the latest "era" completely supplant the previously researched technologies. There is so little variety or options for error in this area that you can rely entirely on the production and technolgy queues...which basically means that you spend the game moving fleets around and fighting battles. Since the battles are essentially just a series of choosing the formation and hitting end turn...it gets boring extremely quickly. If you want a good space strategy game, go buy a copy of Master of Orion II...this one wasn't worth the wait.

Rating:
Summary: Buggy and boring
Review: I was really looking forward to this game. I remember the first Reach for the Stars and how much I love the game, and I find it truly depressing that it's image has been tarnished with this title. The game crashes repeatedly, has image glitches, and scratchy sound. The technology tree is almost pointless since the technologies of the latest "era" completely supplant the previously researched technologies. There is so little variety or options for error in this area that you can rely entirely on the production and technolgy queues...which basically means that you spend the game moving fleets around and fighting battles. Since the battles are essentially just a series of choosing the formation and hitting end turn...it gets boring extremely quickly. If you want a good space strategy game, go buy a copy of Master of Orion II...this one wasn't worth the wait.

Rating:
Summary: Good graphics and great AI!
Review: It is a fun a game to play. Ijust recently got the game and it is awsome.

Rating:
Summary: half a review
Review: Ok so the game has not been released, however you can download a 60 turn demo from mindscapes website. It looks like this could be a nice game.

The game takes much of the tedium of controlling a large empire away by pooling all resources, and allowing entire colony build profiles to be created with a single click. there appears to be a large tech list to research, and the presentation and interface a very polished.

the downsides:

the space battle look fairly simplistic, and uninvolved: you get to pick tactics - which seems to play like a more advanced paper, scissor, stones game. Its a shame they did not take the master of Orion route with combat. Also despite being able to design your own ships, it is hard to determine the affects of different configurations because you are so removed from the action

Still All said i am looking forward to seeing what it is like, and hope that some of these failing have been delt with for the release version.

James Tory

Rating:
Summary: Review of the patched version of RFTS
Review: Reach for the Stars (RTFS) is an excellent strategy game. Unfortunately it has suffered from the sale of its publisher - Mattel Interactive (MI) - just after its release. It has been very difficult to get hold of outside of North America and the new owners of MI have obviously had more important things to do then quickly address various bugs. Nevertheless SSG et al produced a patch fairly quickly to address the more serious crashing problems and I can report that the 1.1 version of the game is stable on my 350Mhz AMD powered machine with a NVidea TNT2 Pro video card. The 1.1 version patch is available at either www.ssg.com.au or www.ssionline.com. Through the Club SSI (www.clubssi.com) discussion forum SSG have announced another patch due soon to fix the remaining gripes mentioned in other reviews.

So why is RFTS an excellent game? Firstly it automates, simplifies and rationalises all of the empire building housekeeping work. The interface is easily navigated with your mouse and there are some excellent hot keys available. This is a major plus, having to individually manage each colony/city each turn used to drive me insane when playing other games.

RTFS deals with this easily with a long easily managed build queue mated with a visual summary of colony attributes. Similarly shipbuilding and research are taken care of in this manner leaving the player to concentrate on strategy.

Unfortunately this subtle approach hides the depth of the game and it does feel strange not having to actively give orders every turn in order to keep your empire going. Depending on which of the sixteen species you play this can be dangerous - you will need to tweak various research or build queues as empires begin to collide. Each species presents a different strategic problem and because each star system has multiple planets each rated for their habitat, it is possible to have several species in one star system. This is where diplomacy comes in.

The object of the game is to build your empire to the point where you can frag the other players. Thus space-fleet combat strategy is fairly important. Here is another misunderstood aspect of the game. If you believe space combat should consist of each sides heroes colliding in a melee of individual dogfights across the battlefield you will be disappointed with RFTS. SSG have decided to treat tactical space-fleet combat from the naval combat (rather than aerial combat) point of view.

Winning fleet battles begins in the ship design screen. Each technology era brings new hulls and weapons to equip them. You must decide which weapons you load onto those hulls. Thus you can optimise your ships for long range missile/beam attack with moderate defensive capabilities or if your hulls are robust enough, you can concentrate on short-range weapons. There are for basic combat ship classes: destroyers, cruisers, dreadnoughts and super dreadnoughts. To win you must build a balanced fleet with all four classes of ships present. Dreadnoughts alone will be destroyed by a smaller balanced force - depending on the relative technologies present.

Finally during the engagement you must select the range and basic fleet formation the fleet will fight in. These decisions will depend on your fleet composition and the weapons they carry, balanced against who and what you are facing.

Yes the combat screen does look like ping-pong, but unless you put some serious thought into it you will get thrashed. I suppose SSG could have put more bells and whistles into this area, except in games lasting only 30 minutes you can end up resolving 10 minor/major engagements in a single turn, with residual clashes to follow as retreating fleets collide in following turns. The stated object of this game is to defeat the opposing empire and rule the universe. Placing emphasis on individual engagements would not only detract from the strategy aspect, but would become monotonous as single turns took longer and longer to finish. I believe SSG have got the balance right.

SSG have also included the editor they used to create the scenarios and campaign. Tech-trees, species, maps, ships, planets, and scripts can all be edited, but the artwork cannot.

However there are a couple of caveats:

Firstly a warning. The game requires the computer to track every fleet and maintain a database of every ship and its weapon load out and damage status within those fleets. As the games become bigger you will find the number crunching required may slow the game down quite a bit. A 350Mhz computer will keep things ticking along fairly well with 3-4 empires and a medium sized map. Any larger and you will find the time lag between hitting a key and getting a response will be annoying.

Secondly, the invasion problem mentioned elsewhere wasn't fixed in the first patch. It will be in the second patch out soon. SSG are a small company and are fairly quick at patching things, but it is an annoying oversight.

Thirdly, there is no espionage or alien artefact research feature in the game mechanics. This is disappointing because skulduggery is bloody good fun and would have added another twist to the game.

Lastly, I would have liked to control planetary invasions the same way you controlled space combat. Designing and equipping armies and then directing their campaign in the same way you direct tactical space combat would have been nice. Alas not in this edition of RFTS - maybe the next one.

Even with these gripes the RFTS ver 1.1 is an absorbing strategy game, the sort of game that grows on you - well worth the money.

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Review!
Review: This game had A LOT of potential which seems to have been almost completely wasted.

I'll start with what this game does right. The overal concept, built in the fashion of a 4X game, was done very well. Essentially the point is to eXplore the galaxy, eXpand your empire, eXterminate and eXploit your enemies. The galaxy size is customizable and can become fairly large. Combine this feature with up to 8 other empires in play and the game can become an epic space opera. The races have their own "living" requirements which allows for a nice diversity of colonization restrictions. Stars which are the primary "dots" you see on the map screen allow for a random number of planets that can potentially be colonizable for your race. This ability and random star placement allows for better replay value. Empire management is extremely easy and it is evident that a lot of thought went in it's design. Most colonies can have their entire build tree set with a simple click of the mouse thanks to the game's well developed "default" build button. This saves a person's sanity in that you are not constantly bothered with having to remember what colonies are building what items especially when you have 20+ colonies. Ship building allows for the setting of a waypoint which allows for ships to "cluster" at a given star. They will move to that waypoint immediately after they are built. The autosave function is a wonderful feature that is unfortunately mandatory if you want to play a full game. The game comes with a VERY comprehensive editor which at first glance looks pretty nice. It allows for complete control over ALL aspects of an empire. It even allows you to completely re-write the technology trees to your liking. Scenarios can be built and linked together to form a custom campaign.

Now what this game does wrong. Probably the most glaring example of this is in the games NUMEROUS bugs. The game crashes constantly! It has at least one major memory leak and some major graphic glitches. It is almost impossible to play a complete game without using the autosave feature. Even when using the autosave it can be difficult to continue as more often than not your game will crash again after restoring to your previous turn. The one way around this I found was to restore a couple turns back and hope that it will progress through the problematic turn. The game also cannot seem to handle it's own complexity without bombing. If you attempt to play the game with more than 3 other empires the game will crash very early and much more frequently than usual. Marine functionality is completely broken. You are supposed to be able to capture enemy colonies with your marines. However when you attempt to do this it just destroys the colony instead. Space combat is akin to playing pong back in the 70's. This is the stupidest, most boring thing I have EVER done in my life. There is absolutely NO thinking or strategy invovled here. You have the option of setting 4 formation choices and 3 range settings then you sit back and watch the computer fight for you. To make matters worse the formations do very little to influence the outcome of the fight. There is no ability to target a specific set of ships and the only thing you need to know before going into combat is to build a bunch of small ships to act as cannon fodder for enemy weapons and take some of the pressure off your big ships. Diplomacy is so oversimplified that it is useless. The one advantage of allying with the other empires is for trade which brings in extra resources for your empire. Another annoying feature is that the galaxy wraps around! What?!? I see absolutely no point in this as it adds nothing but confusion to the game when you expect to see your ship on one half of the galaxy when its really on the other. When you start a new game you're always placed at the center of the map. Some random placement would have been nice but then again maybe random placement is irrelevant since the galaxy wraps around and allows for a constant center position. The game unfortunately just does not have the depth of Master of Orion 2 and combined with the overwhelming number of bugs it very difficult to even play.

This game just doesn't have enough positive features to outweigh the negative. My advice is save the money and buy something else. Major disappointment here!

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Review!
Review: This game had A LOT of potential which seems to have been almost completely wasted.

I'll start with what this game does right. The overal concept, built in the fashion of a 4X game, was done very well. Essentially the point is to eXplore the galaxy, eXpand your empire, eXterminate and eXploit your enemies. The galaxy size is customizable and can become fairly large. Combine this feature with up to 8 other empires in play and the game can become an epic space opera. The races have their own "living" requirements which allows for a nice diversity of colonization restrictions. Stars which are the primary "dots" you see on the map screen allow for a random number of planets that can potentially be colonizable for your race. This ability and random star placement allows for better replay value. Empire management is extremely easy and it is evident that a lot of thought went in it's design. Most colonies can have their entire build tree set with a simple click of the mouse thanks to the game's well developed "default" build button. This saves a person's sanity in that you are not constantly bothered with having to remember what colonies are building what items especially when you have 20+ colonies. Ship building allows for the setting of a waypoint which allows for ships to "cluster" at a given star. They will move to that waypoint immediately after they are built. The autosave function is a wonderful feature that is unfortunately mandatory if you want to play a full game. The game comes with a VERY comprehensive editor which at first glance looks pretty nice. It allows for complete control over ALL aspects of an empire. It even allows you to completely re-write the technology trees to your liking. Scenarios can be built and linked together to form a custom campaign.

Now what this game does wrong. Probably the most glaring example of this is in the games NUMEROUS bugs. The game crashes constantly! It has at least one major memory leak and some major graphic glitches. It is almost impossible to play a complete game without using the autosave feature. Even when using the autosave it can be difficult to continue as more often than not your game will crash again after restoring to your previous turn. The one way around this I found was to restore a couple turns back and hope that it will progress through the problematic turn. The game also cannot seem to handle it's own complexity without bombing. If you attempt to play the game with more than 3 other empires the game will crash very early and much more frequently than usual. Marine functionality is completely broken. You are supposed to be able to capture enemy colonies with your marines. However when you attempt to do this it just destroys the colony instead. Space combat is akin to playing pong back in the 70's. This is the stupidest, most boring thing I have EVER done in my life. There is absolutely NO thinking or strategy invovled here. You have the option of setting 4 formation choices and 3 range settings then you sit back and watch the computer fight for you. To make matters worse the formations do very little to influence the outcome of the fight. There is no ability to target a specific set of ships and the only thing you need to know before going into combat is to build a bunch of small ships to act as cannon fodder for enemy weapons and take some of the pressure off your big ships. Diplomacy is so oversimplified that it is useless. The one advantage of allying with the other empires is for trade which brings in extra resources for your empire. Another annoying feature is that the galaxy wraps around! What?!? I see absolutely no point in this as it adds nothing but confusion to the game when you expect to see your ship on one half of the galaxy when its really on the other. When you start a new game you're always placed at the center of the map. Some random placement would have been nice but then again maybe random placement is irrelevant since the galaxy wraps around and allows for a constant center position. The game unfortunately just does not have the depth of Master of Orion 2 and combined with the overwhelming number of bugs it very difficult to even play.

This game just doesn't have enough positive features to outweigh the negative. My advice is save the money and buy something else. Major disappointment here!