The Fermi Paradox

A fun concept. The gameplay itself is very simplistic and you don't have direct control of the civilizations (e.g.: you cannot prompt a civilization to build spaceships, it happens randomly when they decide to), which could be a negative for some people, but I really enjoy the concept. EXCELLENT art and music direction. However, some the quotes from contemporary media/people feel very out of place in the game, but the fact there are quotes at all is quite nice. Some bugs are to be expected since it's currently in development but it seems to be receiving updates.

I'm sorry, but I several hours into the game, I just fail to understand what's supposed to be the "game" there. When I was buying the game, I assumed it's sort of a resource management thing. Time from time a primitive civilization is born and events happen during which player makes a choice that changes balance of some values describing the civilization (population, knowledge, resources, agressivity, ethics). You can see dramatic moments like extinction events or world wars, giving you option to choose the result. So... that would be kinda fun. Disbalance a civilization, make it too clever with too low ethics and too big agressivity and it will wipe itself out, so you would have to balance... Unfortunately that's what the game isn't. The values most often aren't tied together. The game consists of choosing one of three options that move a single value up or down. Almost often you can choose what seems like a "good" choice (I can't figure out why I want a civilization to become more war-like or lose wisdom). The dramatic moments generally give you choices like "the war wipes the species off/there's a fight/nothing happens". In other words, there's no race against conditions, it's just a big sandbox and unless you want a civilization to die out, it won't. The only thing that resembles fun is reading the flavor text describing the progress of the civilizations, but it's like reading a semi-randomly generated novel where new paragraph unrevels after you randomly click 5-10 times. In fact, the game could probably benefit from employing chat AI, which would at least generate less repetitive content. I'm sorry if I completely misunderstood the game, but not only I didn't enjoy it. I don't understand how it was supposed to be enjoyed.

This game does a fantastic job of showing how brittle intelligent life is. Here you are trying to star trek your future and making intelligent, peaceful group of people, they develop fine, reach new high and boom...anti-matter explosion in the reactor. This is the game where "And then billions died leaving small group of survivors" is a good ending, cause they might have died out. You will watch civilisations raise and fall, you will see AI rebellions, total cultural decay prompted by creating virtual reality and you will watch in silent agony as your hyper advanced civilisation which invented faster than light travel, singularity and is basically nearing godhood die of because they just...stopped breeding. Great game which still requires some polish but overall...yeah, their answer to fermi paradox is a number of great filters which will just eviscerate your civilisations. But! But...when eventually all of them get their shit together, and have tons of luck, and somehow do not kill each other by EXPLODING THEIR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM... you will see the birth of galactic community and you will be proud of them...really proud.

I love sci-fi; Just set your expectations right and I think most sci-fi story fans will get their money's worth. It's more of a story driven game and interactivity is limited.