It's awful ...it's so damn awful. And I don't mean 'cause of muh moral karma police bullshit. Just go play Postal 2 or any olde gory shooter game. Awful "hand painted" graphics, even worse 3D polygons for the NPCs and postal man himself, and terrible tank controls. Also stupidly hard for some of the missions were shoot ASSPLOSIONS! all over you while you're near explosive stuff everywhere.
MOO1: probably revolutionary in terms of both space sims and 4X games. no other TBS game i played manages a galactic empire in the same way but i don't really play a lot of strat games compared to some harder core gamers. playing MOO2, and playing hundreds of hrs of MOM reminded me that the "Civ" way of micromanaging your planets/towns is pretty tedious compared to what MOO1 did with its sliders UI on various metrics. at least it's tedious UNLESS you go for very early win on the smallest maps. managing an empire with those sliders on each planet makes so much sense in hindsight after playing other similar games. MOO2: now this one really looks like it borrowed a lot of stuff from Civ games and MOM. instead of abstracted sliders for metrics on each planets, you gotta pick and choose to produce buildings for each planet. and instead of the heroes that you can control individually like in MOM, you got starship leaders that you can attach to any ship that will boost the stats of the ship and other ships in the same group/fleet depending on their skills. There's even the Mystic X from MOM, who gets totally random skills each time he appears. on top of that you also got leaders that help manage star systems for you, giving you a boost in certain aspects of your planets, like increasing their production output or reducing pollution. overall, great and deep game, but like MOM, it feels too tedious once your empire get huge. in terms of difficulty , i found it slightly easier than MOO1, since this sequel allows you to design your own race for various minmaxed possibilities. also the computer player no longer produces outrageous numbers of ships to wipe you out in early game like in MOO1. of cose ship battles are also more micromanaged than in MOO1, where ships of 1 type are all stacked into 1 grp,and it's easier to massproduce an absurd number of small ships. e.g. in MOO1, one of the best tactics is to create a stack of doom,with the smallest ship with Mass Drivers.
WARNING: If you don't know it already this game was originally made for Win98 and bunch of videocards that are now impossible to find and won't fit on a modern motherboard anyway. It does have a software mode which looks decent enough for late 90s game. So there's a high chance you won't be able to run it on a modern computer and OS. If you CAN run it, it's still a buggy mess with DirectX graphics giving you glitches, so you might have to play it software mode anyway. And the game frequently hangs and makes some of your more powerful weapon disappear. AFAIK no fan made patches were ever made to resolve existing bugs. Otherwise it's a pretty fun game with good humour for a horror themed game. Difficulty is pretty high until you figure out the monster's AI ,attack patterns and weaknesses. There's also a nearly impossible to beat invisible monster battle, which is SKIPPABLE if you know which area to avoid.
