{"id":326,"date":"2006-03-22T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-22T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=326"},"modified":"2006-08-18T12:39:44","modified_gmt":"2006-08-18T16:39:44","slug":"my-review-of-galactic-civilizations-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2006\/03\/22\/my-review-of-galactic-civilizations-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"My review of Galactic Civilizations II"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can read my opinions of Stardock’s hit Galactic Civilizations II in this month’s Computer Games Magazine. You can also read my review of Takeda 2 – a marginal sequel to a marginal original – and my capsule reviews of Star and Crescent and Prussia’s Glory – two wargames that won’t have the broad appeal of GalCiv2.<\/p>\n

Like almost everyone else, I say a lot of nice things about the 4x space game. And it was an easy call. Great games usually are.<\/p>\n

Writing the review, haggling over the final score for it and exchanging thoughts on the game with other reviewers have cemented in my mind my distaste for the component scoring system. You know the one – those sites that break a game into individual bits like graphics and gameplay and then try to use those small bits to come to a larger score.<\/p>\n

There are a lot of things objectively wrong with GalCiv2 as it ships. The documentation has a number of important oversights. It does not Alt-Tab well. Registering the game was a chore made more complicated by overloaded systems as everyone tried to register it. At their best, the graphics are very good; then you have the planetary invasion screens which look terrible. The story based campaign is just not that interesting – even when the bad guys show up with their super weapons. There is no multiplayer.<\/p>\n

So, if you have to assign individual scores to graphics, documentation, storytelling, and technical stuff, GalCiv2 drops from the great to the merely good. And you end up missing the best 4x sci-fi game since Masters of Orion 2.<\/p>\n

Bruce Geryk wrote the review for 1up.com<\/a>. As I read it, I was a little surprised at how much it deviated from anything resembling a game review template. Why did he like it again? There wasn’t much I could put my finger on. But the tone of the review was clear. He was enjoying this game. So, we talked back and forth a bit about the little things that got in the way of our thrills.<\/p>\n

And none of it mattered in the end. A lot of the same objective criticisms can be made about Crown of Glory, a Napoleonic wargame that quickly wore out its welcome. Like GalCiv2, too much is left under the hood to really understand what is going on. Diplomacy can be a bit wonky. The documentation leaves out some important details. But the difference between the two is huge.<\/p>\n

“It’s the gameplay!” I hear you cry. Well, no. It’s not. Since I don’t quite know what you mean by that. The difference is that even when I am floundering around in GalCiv2, I don’t care about all the niggling details. I am given a generous world to explore that doesn’t require I understand everything that is going on. Good design allows a developer to hide some things, explain others and render others completely mysterious. (Personally, I’m on the side of transparency so long as it doesn’t force me to be some godlike accountant.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can read my opinions of Stardock’s hit Galactic Civilizations II in this month’s Computer Games Magazine. You can also read my review of Takeda 2 – a marginal sequel to a marginal original – and my capsule reviews of Star and Crescent and Prussia’s Glory – two wargames that won’t have the broad appeal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-5g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}