Age of Wonders: Planetfall

It's visually appealing, easy to get into, not too much micro managing, and lastly focuses in an XCOM kind of way with tactical battles that are very enjoyable. You can pan AND spin the battle field before committing your soldiers to move/attack. This is the turn based 4X I was hoping for. Worth it and a real bargain when on sale.

Where is the interplay between race (faction in this game) and class? Where are the interesting specialization choices? What happened to all the cool units? What happened to the fun ability of some characters to mind control units on the map and build up a deathball? Clickfest interface clearly designed for controllers instead of PCs (always a sour note) Uninteresting empire development, bland tech tree. Secret technologies lack the fun or impact of character classes, especially without specializations to add variety. Planetfall has the bones to be a really solid game you could play for years and years, but at the end of the day the devs forgot to add in the fun.

For me, this is one of those games you start off excited about, but end up quiting because you havn't been told how the game works. Also, while the game looks good, the story line is very confusing and some times things just happen. In the middle of your turn, all of a sudden the storyline is progressed and one of your heroes die. No reason given. Just dead. This happens allot. Something happens, and the reason for it is very unclear. The mechanics of how citiens and happiness work (in geneneral, how city and sectors works), is also confusing and never really goes into details on how these works.

iThe scifi theme on 4X is awesome, i prefer this one than AoW4

Galaxy still doesn't keep track of time in game, but I have maybe 50-60 hours now. Have won a scenario with every faction now. Only did the first mission of the campaign, it looked pretty boring so I just went to doing scenarios to try different factions and secret techs. I like the game, but I don't think it has a lot of long term replay value with what is in the game right now. Not for single player anyway. The AI is terrible. You can win pretty much every game just by spending influence to compliment the other leaders to stay out of conflicts while you research and build your Doomsday weapon. I have won by sector control and conquest also, but Doomsday seems the easiest against the AI. I haven't looked in the scenario settings, but maybe there is a way to increase the time it takes to win once you launch your Doomsday. 10 turns is too short for the AI to do anything to stop it. The tech trees start to feel pretty much the same after you play for a while. The path to Doomsday is the exact same for all of them. The tree path to get all your facions units is exactly the same for all factions. Many of the mods feel kinda "samey" after a while too, just the damage types change to match what your faction uses. There are a few interesting ones though. Overall, the techs felt pretty generic to me, many of them are the same no matter what faction your are. Hopefully, this can be improved in DLC or mods eventually. The Operations for your faction are really the most unique thing about each faction, the rest of the tech all feels similar. I still give it 8/10 though. The game has been 100% stable for me, no crashes or technical problems. And load times even in 100+ turn games are only about 5 seconds for me. I figure that I got my money's worth out of it already, and I feel like the game has a lot of room to improve with mods and DLC.. Hopefully they can improve the AI a bit also.