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.
It's yet another iteration of the darkest dungeon formula. Choose three characters from about six clases, explore grid map, fight enemies in turn based combat, collect loot. The only twist is, you get your combat abilities mostly from loot items, so technically you can build your deck of combat moves. It's not a bad game, I just see zero improvement over all the previous games that are exactly like this one. It has nice graphics.
It's fairly faithful rerun of the original (awesome) MoO2. There are a couple very minor improvements (spies have new options, diplomacy has been changed, you can build installations on warp points). Nothing game breaking, but it gives it an air of novelty. A lot that has worked well was removed. Times are hectic, so turn based combat, which rocked in the original was changed into real time. I wasn't able to find any tactical depth in that, ships fly again each other and one side goes boom. I failed to find any incentive to design my ships anymore, since I'm not getting any feedback from changes. Forget boarding of ships. Maybe the modifications to weapons make some difference, but since I can't really track them, they don't matter to me and I often end up just having combat auto resolved. This, for me, was a very bad decision which removed 30% of fun I had with the game. Another thing that rocked in MoO2 was necessity to pick one technology out of several and having to get the rest by espionage, trade or just do without. Here the idea was only preserved on a very few techs, removing the dilemmas. I guess it was done to ensure the less popular techs are actually used, but I'd prefer rebalancing instead. One thing I have to give the game credit for are races which are nicely designed and advisors have a bit of personality, sobe being really hillarious. But again - why have some original races been removed? Bottom line - I had some fun with discovering the new stuff, but after a few hours of playing, I've realized the game is too faithful a clone and has removed too many things that were very good. If it was a standalone game, I'd give it decent three stars. But since I've eventually quit and returned to 20 years old (!!) MoO2, finding it more fun, I'm giving two. If you're horribly bored of the original, buy this. Otherwise save you money and play the original.
Where MoO2 was a jewel, MoO3 is a disaster. When I first run the game, I was marveled by graphics and a load of new races and ideas. But the promise quickly turned into disappointment. The biggest problem of the game is not that it's bad. It's a decent manager - if you ignore interface so bad it chases you away all on its own. The real problem is, the game refuses to be played. It's so focused on its million tabs, controls, checkboxes and sliders that it doesn't really allow you to make much of a choice, or if it does, it fails to deliver a decent feedback. So you just sit, keep hitting end of turn button and watch how technologies appear (no, you can't chose the direction of research, you're researching everything at once), planets develop (you can make some token decisions regarding placement of zones, but if you leave it on automatic, it produces just as good results), and sometimes get to produce a ship a send it around. MoO2 had one of the best tactical combats I've seen in space 4X game. Well, here you can forget it. Clumsy realtime battles where individual weapons only manifest as differently colored beams and flashes, since you control taskforces not individual ships anymore. The game is overcomplicated, but not in "hardcore" sense where you draw satisfaction from having complete control over everything, but in sense of burying you in loads of meaningless data with little to no significance, leaving you utterly frustrated. Bottom line - stick with MoO2, there's very little better here and most of the game is much much worse.
MoO1 was a blast - a game which swept me off my feet with it's complex gameplay, large and fairly diverse techtree and truly distinctive races which added to replayability along with randomly generated space. MoO2 was a shock at the first moment - borrowing a number of features from Master of Magic or, if you like, from civilization (though less so). After a bit of grumbling, I gave the game a chance and I wasn't dissapointed. Frankly, I haven't yet found better space 4X strategy, each I've tried (spaceships unlimited, galactic civilizations...) just made me eventually yearn for this classic and return to it, since they were, in some way, lacking in comparison. Among things that make the game incredibly enjoyable are the techtree and the dilema which tech to chose (since you can often only develop one of two or three through research - maybe not so realistic, but heck, it's FUN), construction of custom ships (and the equipment really matters, not the usual +1, +2, +3, ... blaster), several options of winning (diplomacy, conquest, beating the Antareans) and there are more. For the price, it's absolutely unmissable - and it would still be for four times as much.
