User Reviews (1 - 11 of 61)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Play it only if you can't find Master of Orion 1 or 2

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: January 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is a knock-off of the classic Master of Orion (MoO) series. It's not a bad game; it's just that this has been done before and better.

Gameplay: This is a turn-based, strategy game with a somewhat sharp learning curve. The object of the game is to conquer the planets of enemy civilizations with either your military might, cultural influence, or political wherewithal. There is a barrage of information that you need to absorb during gameplay, from statistics to what's going on with your planets' economies. Lots of things can be researched and upgraded, but it's sometimes hard to tell what difference they make in the scheme of things. You have very little control regarding customizing ships. Conflict with other civilizations in this game is inevitable, but not very exciting. There are many lulls in the game, and you'll sometimes get downright bored having to click on the NEXT TURN button until something happens.

Visuals: Ship-to-ship combat is very basic, and surprisingly not as well depicted as in the classic Master of Orion, which came out in 1994! Graphics generally are adequate for such a game, but no real improvement over MoO2.

Sound: The game does have nice music. However, there are no voices beyond the narrator at the opening. I don't recall what sound ships make, but nothing very memorable.

Technical/Replayability: The game was perfectly stable on my computer. The instruction manual is adequate. The developer has released a number of patches and updates that supposedly add some new content to the game. After playing the game once, I had no desire to play it again. Those who like the game should get some value out of it, since it can be replayed with somewhat different results. However, you can only play the human side.

Overall, if you have played Master of Orion 1 or 2, you may find this one to be disappointing. Given that it had the MoO model to work from, there is really no excuse for this game to be as limited and unoriginal as it is.

Terrible AI won't even attack you, horrible game design

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: August 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Galactic Civilizations is the junk food of 4x games.
It's filling and comfortably familar, but after awhile you realize it's making you sick.

It's basically what you would expect if you took every successful 4x game and merged them together, but with no regards for balance or gameplay. The feature list looks impressive, until you realize half the features are broken or unbalanced. Here's a sample game I played once I realized how broken things were:

Normal difficulty/Small Map

Right away I colonized 2 systems.
I did nothing except change research, occasionally build a building, and hit next turn. I did not build any attack/defense ships.

This went on until near the end of the research tree(!), when finally the AI attacked. I built ships to defend, but I was overwhelmed as you would expect. Then they ground invaded. Carrier of 5 million lost for them, killed 3 million of mine, repeat. Sounds bad since I only had 2 planets, right? Well unfortunately the pop of my planet they were invading was 100 billion. They couldn't conceiveably wipe me out since they couldn't make transports fast enough. Why are transports "used up" when you attack anyway?

So after a few hundred attempts they seemed to give up
then space sharks were randomly spawned. Since I had no ships they didn't attack me, and instead wiped out both the remaining ai player's fleets. I couldn't invade for the same reasons they couldn't invade me though, so I just waited to see what would happen.

Eventually I was given one of the AI's systems. Turns out I had set some money in "destabilize" a few dozen turns ago.
I pumped up the amount of money i was spending on it, to about 10% of my economy. Soon both civilizations gave me all their systems, including their capitals!!!!

So basically all you need to do to win is do nothing for a few thousand turns then put some money in destabilizing your opponent's systems and you win. That's it.

Utter junk.

Enjoyable - But Not Fully Refined

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: July 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I tend to get hooked on one game at a time, and will play that game 50 to 100 times in a row, over a course of 6 months to a year, before looking for another game to move on to do the same... this game fit the bill for me over the last year, and I'm just now starting to look for a new replacement "favorite game".

Galactic Civilizations has an excellent AI, and decent 2D graphics and musical score, and an easy to understand user interface. It has a complicated tech tree - even in the longest of games, I was never able to get thru all the possible technologies.

One major negative to GC II is the inability to play against others online. While playing against the excellent AI is enjoyable, I certainly would have liked to play against others at some point.

I've been looking at the Galactic Civilizations II Beta (up to 0.21, as of this writing); it will be quite different from GC, being based on 3D graphics - but, right now, it is hard to judge GC II, as it is still in an early Beta state. Having said that, I think they are putting too much emphasis on ship design in GC II, and not enough on graphics related to planetary improvements (both of which are new features in GC II). I also see where the first release of GC II will not provide the ability to play against other humans - this is unfortunate, as this was probably the biggest deficiency in GC I.

Cheap Rip-off

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 39
Date: July 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Being a Moo fan and seeing this game, I had hopes. boy was I wrong. on the ooutside it loks like an increadible Moo ripoff, which I would not have minded. ounce you start playing however, you come to realize that there is no real hope for this game.

No ship customization, no organized way of of doing combat other than "go here and kill", and for Willy's sake, you can't even play as anyone other than the stupid F***ing humans! Diplomacy you have to discover through tech reserch, even then it's so mundane it hurts. unimaginative planet design, and tedious turns.

Don't get me wronge, there are a handfull of things that are decent. I dig the major and minor races, and how the minor ones just pop up out of nowhere. If you start doing evil your entire screen changes to dictate how ruthless you are. and the random anomalies that you can explore are a nice touch.

All in all, it's an unimpressive game that it more bark than bite.

How can anyone complain?

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 19
Date: July 03, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Fun game, great community, helpful staff at stardock and regular updates and now an expansion pack. It's a game with a simple premise and a challenging AI. The graphics are good enough and its clearly a game for the thinker gamer rather than a "blaster".

Wretched in every way, regrettable waste of time & money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 33 / 44
Date: June 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you see this game laying on the street, in a perfect, factory sealed box, with a yellow post-it note saying "Free game! Take me!" Just walk way. Even the act of bending over and picking up this game will be a waste of time.

Perhaps I'm being a little facetious, but I do urge you to read all of the reviews here before considering this game. You'll find that this game's high rating has been artificially inflated by tons of glowing one and two sentence reviews, while the more in-depth reviews tend to give the game only one or two stars.

To put it simply, Galactic Civilizations is not a good game. Out of the box, the game feels much more like some sort of free-download beta than a fully produced and marketed product. The game is amateurish in almost every way and borrows heavily, yet unsuccessfully from previous games such as the Master of Orion series. For instance when you complete research on a new technology you are taken to summary screen with of all things, an animated science robot - a scene lifted directly from MOO.

Being a MOO knock-off would not be a bad thing in the least if Galactic Civilizations were not so seriously flawed in other areas. And flawed it is, in almost every aspect from government, to diplomacy, to ship building and combat - the game plays like nightmare version of MOO where everything looks good on the surface, but is summarily lacking any depth or even basic usability. A simple task like moving a ship from one area to another is needlessly complicated. Research is almost meaningless and offers more of just another pretty button to click than any sort of opportunity for strategy. Colonizing planets is equally maddening, where as the planets are simply reduced to a single number on the screen - higher the number, better. Perhaps most damning of all is the wretched ship combat system - of which there is none. Your ships meander around space, bump into an enemy ship and through tweets of the speaker are either dead or victorious. There is no opportunity to maneuver, upgrade, customize or really do anything with ships other than produce them with one click and watch helplessly as they are annihilated fifty turns later - long after you've already forgotten about them.

After you've taken a look at the option screen and automated the more boring tasks in the game, sit back, relax and get ready to click the TURN button for the next several days. That's all there is to this game... every aspect of it is completely mundane.

A bad game is one thing... and honestly, this wouldn't cause me to be so needlessly negative. After all, just because I've been playing MOO for years now and find myself jaded toward inferior products doesn't mean that some other smuck couldn't enjoy this game, right? Sure... However, a bad game that is also wracked with bugs and frequent crashes can safely be said to be enjoyable by no one using both hemispheres of their brain.

Personally, I'm always skeptical of reviewers who complain about crashes and glitches. I tend to think that ninety-percent of such crashes are due to user error. But trust me on this one - this game crashes through no fault of your own. I'm a former system administrator and I maintain my multiple computers to the highest standards. I am meticulous in keeping my software and drivers updated and using quality hardware. Further, in the past six months I've played perhaps twenty different games, most of which were much more demanding on my system than Galactic Civilizations, and while a few did suffer common glitches and occasional crashes, none came close to the sheer unreliability demonstrated by GC.

So the game crashes every now and then, what game doesn't, you ask. Usually when a game crashes, you just reload and resume from your most recent save. It's not that simple with Galactic Civilizations. The most frequent issue with this game is an abrupt "crash to desktop" failure - in fact, if you search the GC support forums you will find hundreds of posts regarding this issue. Confounding this problem is that your most recent "auto-save" will crash on you as well - making it impossible to resume your game!

Due to this problem, I was unable to complete a singe campaign - despite trying dozens of times over the course of several weeks. The only work around I can see for this problem is manually saving your game every few minutes - an act which further degrades the already low quality of the game play experience.

Often when a game experiences such a common problem the manufacturer will debug the problem and release a patch. Not so with the makers of Galactic Civilizations. Over the course of several emails with their tech support, the only solution presented was to install some spy-ware encumbered software (GC's so called "Stardock") that would some how generate an error log which I would then be required to email to them. This was unacceptable course for me and I gave up. (Indeed, to install and use this second application you have to fill out an invasive form requiring information like your age, address and other info which no one should have to give out in order to fix a broken game.)

If I could get my money back for this game, I would in a heartbeat. However, I wouldn't stop there, if I could also exact some sort of humiliating revenge upon it's creators without running astray of the law I would do that also. This game is just that bad...

Beautiful!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 17
Date: May 16, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This game is on my top five list. From the start, I was hooked... at first I fumbled around, figuring things out... but when I got into it, boy did I ever!

Micromanagement is something I've never been good at, which is my downfall because I love the complexities of strategy games. However, this takes the cake. Micro was never an issue when I played this game... and I only played the demo!

Now that I own it, I must say that it has blown me out of the water as far as expectations. MOO3 this is not!

So boring!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 17
Date: April 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i played this game maybe a few days and then never again. It is just plain boring. Nothing in comparison to MOO3 or civilization. I really do not understand why today the AI player is so unlogically sophisticated. Do not understand me wrong since i love a challenge. Its only that why should i want to try to outrun a car. That would not make sense!

First, Four Stars, Falling Further With Time

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 50 / 51
Date: January 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I do like Gal Civ for a number of reasons.
1 Minor mistakes are not fatal
2 You can micromanage planetary production as much as you want,
3 You don't have to micromanage if you don't feel like it
4 I like the exploration and discovery aspects
5 The frequent updates and addons are pleasant
6 There is an overall strategy to gaining influence, military might, and economic strength that is satisfying
7 I really enjoy exerting enough influence in a sector to cause the alien systems to surrender to me.

The problem is that most of the things I like were only true until I was thoroughly familiar with the game. Oh, I'd buy it again even knowing what I know now, but it promised a fuller experience than it delivered in my opinion.
1 The AI has a huge advantage in reaching habitable planets
(I may be petty, but the scrambling for habitable planets is frustrating because I can send a ship that starts closer to a good planet than the AI's only to discover the AI's ship moves in record time and claims the prize)
2 The survey ship, which is not meant to be a fighting ship is the only one that can get offensive and defensive bonuses from the various specials floating around in space at the start of the game. (Your survey ship can get enough bonuses to be more powerful than battleships - somewhat less than realistic) By the time you can build heftier ships with survey abilities, most of the specials have been explored and used up. So, the more advanced survey ships are seldom useful.
3 Though space battle tactics are considered unimportant by the developers, I consider tactical combat challenging and exciting. I believe the game lacks some punch for that reason.
4 Once familiar with the game the anomalies become hohum, even the free ships.

With all the potential of this game I was looking for that little extra "something" and didn't find it. The game is very enjoyable and I recommend it to those those with long range gaming goals. It has the framework to be much more, however, and I hope the developers produce it in another edition.

What a waste

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 40
Date: January 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This had to be the most boring game that I have every tried to play. I spent 2 hours trying to figure it out to no avial. I feel like the reviews were written by someone who was paid (I must be missing something).

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next 

Actions