You can control the speed that things move, but you won’t want to that often speeding up the action means your to-do list piles up and can go south pretty quickly. The action moves in real time, rather than in turns, so it gives you a sense of urgency and flow. So far, Stellaris has mostly hit the sweet spot between standard 4X gameplay and grand strategy. In Stellaris, it pays to create your own race
During the far-too-infrequent combat sessions, I would have liked some marches or other more violent music-to-blow-things-up-by, but in general it offered a space-y vibe. The music accompanying the view delivers a first-rate experience, and I often left the game running (but at menus, for fear of disaster - again, more on that in a second) while I did other things just to let it warble its orchestral and New Age white noise. Tiny ships, darting everywhere, firing salvos of light - if you could picture holding the universe in your hands, each star a tiny pinprick of light, you’ve got a good idea of how Stellaris’ graphics and soaring soundtrack make you feel.
Space battles, while offering a little less control than I might have liked (more on that later), look awesome, every time. Menus aren’t its only aspect that looks appealing: The star systems themselves to the tiles you control or the planets’ surfaces show the results of careful design and a smooth artistic touch, and I stopped plenty of times to just admire how something as simple as the “travel trails” showing a ship’s trajectory were built. Watching and listening to Stellaris creates a joyous experience. It was like settling into the pilot’s seat of a luxury jet and realizing that I immediately knew all the controls, with everything placed in easy reach and chromed to make it pretty.Īnd boy, does this game deliver pretty pictures In a game where clicky-clicky forms the heart of the real-time gameplay, it felt completely refreshing for my little command cockpit to feel so intuitive, easy to navigate, and pretty to look at. A handy “outliner” menu at the side of the screen makes it helps you zip to where the action is, and the screens that track what you’re doing in different locations show obvious thought and intentional design. This game makes it easy - fun, even - to keep track of what’s going on. I like the “you’re starting from scratch” feel of most 4X titles and the feeling that if your strategy sucks, it’s all short term - making it easy to redirect and get back on track. But after playing through more than 50 hours of Stellaris, I’m starting to think my complaint with earlier grand strategy games didn’t stem from their finicky, thoughtful nature. Image Credit: Heather Newman What you’ll like (so far)Ī grand strategy game that makes it easy for you to manageįirst, my bias: Given a choice between a standard 4X strategy game that invites you to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate, and a grand strategy title that forces you to micromanage a thousand different sliders and activities and diplomatic relations and acquisition of a gajillion materials, all as part of a grand plan to take over something, somewhere, I tend to lean toward the former.
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