Imperium Galactica

I had a lot of fun in the early 2000s playing this game on my old Pentium 150 running Win98 SE, and I've been looking for another copy ever since. Thank you for making this available again. A word of warning to anyone who hasn't played it before, tho': make sure you've researched everything you possibly can and have built up an overwhelming fleet before the final bad guy aliens show up, otherwise they'll stomp you flat.

Remember all the diplomacy, epic space/ground battles, immersive story and feeling of reign over the galaxy? Back in the day, I was completely astonished by this 4x gem, but sadly I have to say, it didn't age well. When I look out of the nostalgia, UI is messy, non-comprehensive and it's quite hard to grasp all the gaming complexity even thou game is dozing it to you in small portions. Without opening manual and some online tutorials, I've been struggling with merely basic operations as adding new fleets, combat, production, science... That said, after a few hours I have given up because instead of joy from conquering the universe, I've been fighting UX mostly.

dawad

I've had this game on CD-ROM from years past and it was really my first foray into Strategy/RTS. The game plays like a Real-Time 4X strategy game in the sense you have to explore (for new worlds), expand (your empire), exploit new technologies and exterminate your enemies. This was also the first game I had encountered that had both space and ground encounters done really well for its day. The basic premise is to build your empires planets (which on its own is very reminiscent of Sim City), expand your territory,build up a fleet, and research new tech (to improve planets and your fleet). All of these things combined made for a very enjoyable experience that felt neither rushed nor overly long. The few minuses that take away from a full 5 star are the somewhat mediocre voice acting (to me its still a 5 but that is a biased opinion given my nostalgia glasses). It's fairly cheesy and predictable and has a fair lack of proper emotion for a lot of the lines. Also, the campaign mode is quite punishing at the higher difficulties (for me, anyway) which can make the game not quite enjoyable. Finally, at least for my old CD-ROM version, it doesn't exactly play well on modern machines. I haven't played the GoG version but I have played the Open Imperium Galactica version which has been remade for modern machines and that one plays like it did on my old 486. I would first check out the Open IG version to see if you enjoy that before dropping cash on this version.

I played this game a lot back then and it is still awesome but you should try IG2 because it still blows all competition away (I'm looking at you MOO and Stellaris). But until IG2 arrives you can enjoy this gem from Hungary.