This is especially true since you can customise the basic ship types so much that even those that look similar can have vastly different abilities.Īpart from the combat the other main issue is the lack of personality, a common issue for all such sci-fi games.

They all have silly sci-fi names but actually watching them in action it’s not necessarily obvious that they’re any more effective or powerful. There’s also a lack of visual feedback in terms of what any of your ships or weapons do. The combat side of things is a very strange idea and not at all what you’d expect given the depth and variety of the strategy level gameplay. Heroes can earn experience and level up, but they feel a very mechanical addition to the game and never exhibit any real character or personality. Your chance of success can be improved by using hero characters, who can give special abilities or status buffs to your ships. Space battles are a rather strange cross between a trading card game and rock-paper-scissors, where you draw a card to play in three phases of combat and then just sit back and watch what happens. Like all Civilization style games managing a larger number of outposts can get very complicated once you’ve been playing for a few hours, but the computer is a very competent overseer if you want to start delegating the finer details and concentrate on the big picture.Īt a strategy level Endless Space is at the absolute top of its genre, but once the inevitable starship combat begins it begins to falter. All sci-fi strategy games suffer from the problem that instead of researching something as immediately understandable as a granary or biplane you’re putting all your resources into Star Trek style technobabble like ‘Photon Distortion’ and ‘Baryonic Shielding’. This allows you greater freedom to specialise but it’s a risky proposition if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing. The technology tree branches in four specialised directions, rather than the more linear path of Civilization. These two goals are usually intertwined, in that often the primary reason for claiming a new planet is because it has a particular resource necessary to research or manufacture a new piece of equipment. When not being interfered with by one of the other races the game has two main priorities: colonising new planets and researching new technology. And even if you do get confused as to what something means the game’s help system is impressively easy to access, and informative without being long-winded. Despite the necessary complexity of Endless Space’s menus and displays the interface is excellent throughout, with all the many icons proving cleverly distinctive and usually fairly obvious in function.

Endless space star trek mod