Stellaris

Having played the game for awhile I started to notice aspects of it that seemed severely under baked like for example, diplomacy and espionage. Reading up on the topics in the official wiki, I come to find out that the features that I thought were missing do infect exist. For a price. It looks like Paradox carved out a number of key aspects of the game, only to turn around and sell them as DLC. Not cool. Also the UI is a mess, with key information buried in weird, unintuitive places and information that is largely useless, misleading, or just plain wrong, displayed front and center. It’s a good thing I bought it when it was heavily discounted, because the base game is more like a bare bones addition then a full game. I would have been very angry if I had spent $40 on this. Stellaris is not a bad game but one that, in my opinion, fails to live up to its potential.

Want to get a complete game? Buy a quasilion DLCs each worth a finger, add to that the full game price you already payed for the base game and you got yourselves a cash cow. This behavior should not be supported. I hope there will be a complete edition one day that delivers the whole experience.

I can see a potential in this game. However, it's only a potential. The need to go via Paradox to go multi isn't great, but has been mentioned in the reviews before. At the moment though, the game is barely playable, and that comes frome someone, who spent countles hours playing MoO3 before they even thought about fixing it a bit with the mods. The memory leak is terrible, absolutly terrible. You can try restarting the whole game every 20-30 minutes, but how many times can you do that, before you think "hold on, I had more fun with mine sweeper" or something along this lines. The game stars trying to put you in windowed fullscreen mode, this won't even let you have those 20 minutes of nice, smooth gameplay that this game is capable of. Yes! It is capable of it! So if you think you can put up with playing in short bursts (interesting idea of reducing your time spent playing in general), or love this kind of sand boxy space games, it might be good for you even now. If not, it might be worth to wait for them to fix the memory leak. We're talking Paradox here though and tendency towards milking gamers with DLCs, so it might be a good while. Overall, it might be enjoable, and I did ejoy it, though for a short while. After that it's griting your teeth or frequent restarting. I would put 3 stars, if the reload times for the whole game were quicker, but as it is, it's 2 stars.

I got this game with a humble bundle on steam for pennies and it's good. My problem with it is you could buy 10-15 other games for the price of this one. This is the same reason why despite me being interested in a couple of their other titles I haven't purchased them. It is good, but not better than having 10 good games.

I love the game, i spend hours on it. However withouth dlc you miss out on most fun things. The base game is pretty boring. And having to pay 3 times as much as the base game for dlc that makes it more fun is a joke. Paradox does this with all their games and i dont know how that keeps working. As im writing this i can see the dlc in the top corner and see it cots 20 euro for 1 DLC hahahaaha. For that money you can get a whole new game that is actually complete. My advice is to play the 'demo'for free.