The premise of rebooting Master of Orion was interesting. Of course a lot of people were afraid it would tarnish their memories of one of their beloved franchises but as I have never played those when they came out I can not pass judgement over that. I can however judge this game on its own. There are some excellent things, such as beutifull graphicss and clean but stylish UI. Some great music and sound effects and in general the core gameplay loop is addictive and major design issues were resolved. It seems highly polished. It seems because that is just the visible surface of the game when you'd play it for e.g. an hour. Unfortunately there are also many problems. The games Early Access stage was quite interesting and you can expect a lot of changes, unfortunately this game released a bit prematurely. It seems the habit of changing things around a lot by the developer continued after release. It is good to have active support on a title post release but when the developer does not communicate their intentions clearly those changes appear very willy nilly and will upset customers. Failing to manage expectations will make any change a failure in the eyes of some users. Most irritatingly, even after release they regularly broke savegames without warning (and no option to roll back to at least finish your games). Obviously, talking about customers, Wargaming does not consider GOG as an actual important store front. On the one hand it is understandable that Steam is ginourmous. On the other hand, the 'meh' for witholding the Linux build and essentially forcing GOG to link up GOG accounts to Wargamings DRM system are a bit of a spit in the face. GOG used to care about the quality of their release, technically and in player experience as they were carefully restoring historical gaming artifacts, but now with the brand new releases it is clear GOG will sell it as long as they can make their cut. (At least most consumer laws requires them to have a refund policy.) With this attitude this game is essentially unplayable. It is impossible to play through a full game as stuff continously and sometimes intentionally breaks or they throw you a game design/balance curveball out of the dark because they feel like it. :(
