If you've ever wanted to play inside a 4X universe, but instead of managing an empire, you get to be the shadowy figure running rampant, this is the game for you. You know those mercenary "leaders" you hire in Master of Orion II? This is you. You take an active role in the development of each species, strengthening tech here, crippling infrastructure there, and most importantly, getting Race A to befriend/murder Race B. As the last of an ancient and despised race of space dragons, your task is to form a lasting alliance of planets among squabbling, growing junior races only recently throwing off their chains and heading out into space. You work behind the scenes, doing a variety of activities, more than I can list here. You can help with virtually any task that a 4X empire would do, assisting with the construction of economic/health/environmental/war efforts, but also branch out into theft, piracy, and plunder. You can also steer races towards decisions that eventually benefit the Federation--or for those who hate you, influence others against them in back room deals. If you fired up Oregon Trail just to do the hunting, a good chunk of the game takes place in turn-based, overhead space battles, similar to the Space Rangers series. Plenty of blam blam.
This is a very good old school competitive FPS. Excellent, even. The look is original, the jump-kick mechanic is a skill worth learning, and the play is quick without being overwhelming. It's very skill-based, and there are no for-pay unlockables, no profit motives. This also means that most of the gameplay boils down to deathmatch, deathmatch, deathmatch. No matter what game mode you are playing, you are employing the exact same skills. This is either admirably pure, or sadly out of sync with how games have evolved. Take a look at the top multiplayer games played on Steam, for example. How many of them have Quake 3-style gameplay as a primary selling point? There is no real co-op model, meaning that you must enjoy playing against people, many of whom are guaranteed to be better at the game than you. But, over here in California, the servers within reach are very sparsely populated. Even if you're looking for a challenge, and you just haven't had enough deathmatch over the past twenty years, you're better off looking elsewhere: Quake Play4Free, Nexuiz... even Half Life Deathmatch Classic has more populated servers. If you've got a bunch of friends to play with, and you don't need co-op, this is a fantastic game. The rest of us, it's a well-intentioned and well-made gem that we sadly don't have much use for.
