This doesn't feel ready yet. Combat is laborious at best and you are immediately besieged CONSTANTLY by a litany of enemies from all directions. The tutorial is extremely slow paced and hard to pay attention to so sorry if I missed something in that labor of a task, but as it is now I just can't recommend it.

I'm repeating other reviews, but ZEPHON is like an evolved Warhammer 40k: Gladius, and I think it eclipses that game in nearly every way.

From what I understand of the story, a Lovecraftian-gods worshipping alien race escaped a genocide, arrived at Earth and genocided humanity, then a human AI became sentient and genocided the aliens back. Meanwhile what's left of humanity tries to eke out an existence on the ruined hellscape of planet Earth as the AI (ZEPHON) and the aliens duke it out. And there's an almost biblical final battle on the horizon.

The setting is a real highlight for me, with shades of Terminator, H.P. Lovecraft, and Philip K. ♥♥♥♥. It reminds me of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin from the Nintendo DS in some ways, though I can't put my finger on why. Graphics are crisp, though from a distance the world looks VERY close to Gladius's. Art direction is great overall, though. The soundtrack is a banger. Units look and sound great (and they've got voice acting, thank God). Like Gladius, it's a very combat and tactics focused 4X, almost like a simplified, zoomed out XCOM at times. Unlike Gladius, there are some diplomatic options here.

ZEPHON is just cool. Battleships with legs and mouths fire broadsides at troops. A leader feeds pieces of his flesh to his soldiers, which heals them. One of the heroes is literally a Gundam. That's cool. I could go on. Many of the 4X games gunning for Civilization's throne (and Civilization itself, sometimes) just don't seem cool to me or they're fiddly to the point of not being fun. As a 4X fan who's getting older and less patient every day, I appreciate games like Gladius, ZEPHON, and even Old World, for trying new things with the genre.

Deserves a thumbs up, even though there is obviously room for improvement.

I'm not going to write a lengthy review, because I'm not particularly good at it, and secondly, I just wanted to shift the rating a tiny bit.