This is the best Space strategy game that ever was. Why the 4 starts? Poor optimisation. I have a 5 years old i7 and the game becomes literally unplayable at certain point, slowing down to about 1/3 of it's normal speed. There is no multi core support, they run the whole game process on 1 core and in later stages of the game there are hundreds of stars with thousands of planets visible, thousands of ships, various trade-lanes and other process and this is running real-time on a single core, slowing down the pace to unbearable slow motion. Mind you I run the small Galaxy settings, I wonder if there is a PC that could run the largest galaxy without this slow down? There are also various performance related bugs, like for example if your fleet of ship splits for any reason (lost a fight and is returning from an emergency jump, or you split it intentionally), then populating the fleet list with extra fleets will also slow down the game. There are probably other glitches that cause these slow downs and Paradox doesn't care about fixing them. They usually only affect mid to late game performance. I don't personally mind their DLC business, people need to realise that you can't finance a game development for a decade from a single sale of 30-40 euro game! The crying about prices of DLC are out of touch with reality.
I don't write reviews, so expect a ramble. Short version: It's very enjoyable. 5/5. Long ramble: Writing this after 3.5 hours of gameplay, that's around where I finished Chapter 1. It's more fun than the Old school Doom 1 & 2. It's like a good mashup of Doom 2016 with Doom 2 and Blood (the old game). I enjoy the arena like locations, where the area gets locked down until you kill all enemies in it. I play on hard (3rd out of 4 difficulties) and it just feels right for a veteran player. Each level feels different, enemies have great variety and guns are satisfying. What more do you need?
This game developer has a very bad reputation in regards to the amount of bugs they leave in "finished" games. I for my self will wait for 1-2 years, before buying this game, so that most of the game-breaking bugs get fixed. I came to this conclusion based on my early purchase of Pathfinder where I encountered a game breaking bug after spending good 30 hours in the game. I never finished the game thanks to that.
The biggest flaw of this game is its lack of fun. It's simple as that. Authors made every choice less fun and more annoying and boring: - combat is annoying - story is anticlimatic mess, who ever wrote/implemented it should be kicked in his private parts - leveling up is boring - companions and NPCs are boring They won't even allow you to kill the dragon (they make it so OP that the only way for you to kill it is with tricks/cheese). You spend hours and hours to get pass the biggest dungeon to finally find it's boss - a majestic dragon! Only to find out YOU CANNOT KILL IT!!!!! Instead it gives you this BORING quest. I felt so let down by this that I quit the game. It took me about a month to convince myself to continue playing but eventually I gave up on the game almost at the end, couldn't bring myself to endure the excruciating boredom anymore. I didn't care about the story, because it's just so dull I lost interest. I don't understand who in their right mind gives thisgame 5 stars? These people must be so deprived of RPGs they throw 5 star reviews on anything. Obsidian fixed their reputation with Tyranny, which is not 5 star game either but at least it's FUN! Buy that if you want to support Obsidian.
Only reason this doesn't deserve 5 stars is the length of the game. The very first play-through will take you only something between 3-4 hours, which is far too short for me. I ended up wanting more... :(
