If you liked playing the original Master of Orion, you'll like this game. When I first started playing it I didn't like how they'd changed it. After playing it, I think they changed it for the better. I've always liked MOO 1 better than MOO 2. 2 It felt too building centric and it felt bogged down compared to the first one. This one does have buildings, but it doesn't feel as bogged down as 2. With this one they took the good things from MOO 2 and combined them with the good things from MOO 1. I found myself getting sucked into the game just like I did 20 years ago. The animations are pretty good. They are true to the original species. I turned the voice acting off. It's good, but it gets repetitive. The ship building is a little simplified and streamlined, but complicated enough to create your own ships. They put in a system of nodes so you can create choke points. It felt weird at first, but I like it. That's the thing with this game. It's its own game, but it is true to Master of Orion. The combat is ok. I just find myself putting it on auto though and watching it happen. I haven't really found many space combat games that lend themselves to real strategy. Even in Homeworld you just pick which guys to have your ships attack. That's kind of what it's like here. The animations and sound effects do look pretty cool. The lasers and missiles and explosions make it look like a real space battle. You can tell that they spent a lot of time working on the interface to figure out how to streamline managing your colonies. It works pretty well. You can automate what you want, but easily have control of what you want. I promise you will not be disappointed like with Master of Orion 3. Yuck. It's not just an update of the original game (which I would like because using DOSBOX for it kind of sucks.) It is its own game, but it does it very well and I am very happy I bought the game. I've been a long time fan of Master of Orion and I'm glad they made this game.
I had to download the NO cd crack too. It wouldn't work otherwise.
