I purchased this game off Steam in April 2014 and haven't regretted it. This review is based on Albion Prelude as it is the only version I've played. Think EVE Online but without the trolls and single player only. YOU decide what you want to do. The NPCs either leave you alone, or come at you, and that decision is based purely on your standings. Why do I class this as an RTS and Open World? Well, in this game you can do whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want. How you interact with the other factions of the game is the RTS element. There are several starting points in the game which you pick at game start up. I typically start as Humble Merchant and build my empire based on money, economics and infrastructure, and not worry about a plot line, however, you can also play a military plot and have a decent ship on day one. One downfall of this game is the "save game" mechanism. You're given save slots to save your game to, and only 10 at that (Well, 13, but 3 are auto-save slots). If you plan on changing 'careers', you'll probably want to move your existing saves out somewhere else, or, use a single slot for each career. There are times you might want to backpedal a few saves, but I guess that just adds to the RTS aspect and decision making. I don't consider this a negative in my rating, just something to be aware of. Graphics are breath taking at times. The ships sometimes look like they could be very real. The audio is well done when it comes to hearing things be shot at, and hearing things blow up. Most of the game can be played through just the keyboard, but mouse activities are needed for controlling extremely agile ships. If you like space shoot-em-ups, or you like economical games, or you like empire building games, the entire package is worth the $10-$20. Replay value is limited at the start (Which game isn't?) but once you get a foothold in the universe, it is different EVERY time because YOU can make it different every time.
SMAC/SMAC works on Win 7, x64, Intel Gen1-I7 @ 3.3ghz with nVidia GTX570. All videos and in-game functionality works great, and I was VERY worried about that pre-purchase! I've NOT found a problem in-game that I experienced with my previous versions of this game. However, this game doesn't play nice towards external applications. 1> Don't bother hitting ALT-TAB, CTRL-ESC, or WIN-anything. The keys are bound to work in-game only and somehow forces Windows/Explorer to "forget" these exist while the game is running. I'm running on a quad-monitor system, but even with that monitor count, as the second point is going to mention, normal tasks of swapping windows (Alt-Tab), opening new applications (Win-R), and general navigation of your computer via keyboard becomes a pain. 2> SMAC launches to be full screen on whatever you designate as your "primary monitor" and is also run as "Always On Top". So ANY applications you have will appear UNDER the SMAC window. So if you do manage to launch an application, and if that application happens to start on your primary monitor, you CAN'T get to the application. ALT-SPACE is disabled, so you can't use the usual trick to move windows around with the usual key presses. 3> This game has sucked my time up from doing anything else productive on my computer. Two of my four monitors probably feel useless as one just tells me the time, and the other is holding all my desktop icons. ;)
