I've been in it a few hours, and I gotta' say I'm impressed as hell. Loaded it up and it seemed to have a clean interface, attractive enough... got into some tutorials, and it very concisely explained a lot of stuff (which shouldn't be hard to figure out for anyone that's played this kind of game before). But at the same time, while it seemed simple and easy, it seemed like there was a ton of options to the point where you could easily get overwhelmed. In practice, though, my first game is indeed moving at a very, very slow pace. This is in real-time, but the only thing that manages to do is make the combat feel a lot better and more interesting than something like
GalCiv. Otherwise the game is very comfortably a 4X game, and even in combat it isn't like you get rushed and suddenly you're dead. There's lots of time in which to gather your forces, try to regroup, make adjustments. Even a small frigate getting totally pounded didn't just instantly die when up against a capital ship. Of course, it didn't take
long to die, but you do watch the opposing forces physically have to focus attack from ship to ship and move down the line, slowly but steadily taking out the enemy... it isn't just a blitz.
Everything else seems fairly robust. Lots of stuff to build and research, slow pace to gear up and get better, and lots of little things to focus your attention on as you do it. It very much feels like
GalCiv without turns and with a tradeoff of less diplomacy in exchange for more and better combat options. Also there's no custom ship building or anything like that, so ultimately this does have a streamlined feel to it, but just less so than you'd expect when you see "real-time strategy" in there. It's a really nicely done combination that's satisfying on multiple levels, and while it isn't a graphical powerhouse, it
does actually look quite good, seems like it would probably scale pretty well, and there are moments when the sound and art design come together to deliver quite a whallop. Combat looks competent when you've got a few ships, but it's really nothing to write home about, but when you actually get a decently-sized force (and I'm not talking huge, I've only been in one fight that consisted of more than 8 ships or so, and this was my capital ship + 5 frigates vs. maybe 7-10 small ships on the other side) things can look pretty remarkable. The capital ships are especially cool, as you'd imagine, and the battle sounds have some really nice touches that bring things to life. Orbital bombardment is a bit lame because the textures on the planets don't look so great up close, but some of the deep impact sounds are alarmingly fun, and aside from the textures it seems like you really do get a nice feeling of punch from most of the animations of larger guns and stuff. Despite those few textural issues here or there, the ships themselves actually look quite good up close. Not super high poly, but the textures are good, there are lots of little details (watching the capital ships fire is fun), the lighting model is nice, and the models seem to make good use of every poly instead of being wasteful.
So yeah, color me impressed. I haven't even done much yet and I'm having a really good time. This is, in some ways, the game I hoped
GalCiv 2 would be (particularly the addition of multiplayer). It's also fortunate that the two don't negate each other, though. There are more defensive/cultural/diplomatic options in
GalCiv, and of course it's just a bit "bigger" on the overall strategic scope.
Anyway, all the good press definitely seems warranted.
EDIT - Pretty much nothing to say except that it's been more of the same fun stuff. I can't imagine how crazy it gets on really huge maps... even this tiny one I'm playing on *feels* really big, which is a nice change of pace. Games like this often don't nail scope, but this one feels pretty bang-on.
I found a video review on YouTube, and as terrible as those things can be, this guy actually demonstrates quite nicely in a 10-minute review why the game is so cool, why it's really still a 4X game at heart and not a hardcore RTS, and all the video stuff shows you practically anything you could be curious about, from menus to gigantic battles the size of which I haven't even experienced in relative fractions. It's well worth watching if you want to get a good feel for the game.
