Historically, I've always disliked "Grand strategy" games. Crusader kings, Europa Universalis, and my most loathed of all: Total war. Something about the gameplay felt so painfully stilted. I didn't feel much in control, and things progressed so slowly I would wonder if I would even get to feel any sort of accomplishment before the dreadfully dull maps would burn into my retinas from the constant glazed-over staring. The only game ever challenging my predisposition against the genre being Stellaris.

• Of the many things I feel the game does well; the impossibly vast scope and the sense of exploration and discovery are by far the best. Maps can sprawl further than any other grand strategy game could dream of. Even a few days into a campaign, there will still be massive swathes of the galaxy shrouded in darkness to you. And packed tightly into this nebulous sandbox is a virtual slot-machine of encounters, ranging from minor boons or inconveniences to multiple-arc storylines that can have brilliant rewards or cataclysmic consequences depending on what actions you take and what beliefs your empire has. T̶̻͝h̶͈̓é̵͍ ̷̫̾W̸̢̉o̵̝͋r̴̗̒m̶̝͝ ̴̻̕ḻ̷̎o̴̗̊v̶̞̚e̶̱̅s̵̳̊ ̶͙̾y̸̭͑ö̶̙́u̶͉͝
  
  
• The progression of your empire, along with the rest of the galaxy, is very fast. With multiple options for expansion outside of simply "grow your borders with time and cities." The only way to expand is through conquest or building starbases. These starbases cost influence -- a critical resource, and also the only resource you can't reliably trade for and buy. Giving you options of expanding early to make a mad-dash towards hyperlane chokepoints, blocking other colonies from entering your space and claiming what you want. Or you can wait and unlock abilities, edicts and sciences that vastly reduce the cost. Allowing you to rapidly bloom your boarders outwards to engulf everything available. Or you can simply build tall, and stick in small areas. Only colonize a few planets with little starbases, but become a powerhouse through your reduced unity and technology costs and eventually let megastructures to the heavy lifting for you. Allowing you to generate more than a galaxy-smothering empire could ever dream.
  
  
• The usually simple mechanic of your empire's citizens (or in this case, "pops.") Has been greatly detailed. Allowing you to set individual laws for individual species and even subspecies of every race within your boarders. You can set specific living standards, specific educations, declare if they're enslaved or free -- and you can even put them on welfare, or keep them doped up on chemical stimulants. Keeping them very very happy, albeit very useless. Great for appeasing certain political parties that you want to keep happy within your community. And with dozens of alien races, comes dozens of physiological needs and differing talents. You could buy a bunch of pops off the market with specialties in harvesting food and put them on a lush, farm-covered savanna world. You can genetically engineer a race of impossibly strong juggernauts and put them on mining planets, as well as using them as shock-troopers during invasions. You can gather your empire's best and brightest and put them on an abandoned, ancient world covered in ruins and seemingly arcane technological artifacts and watch your tech gains skyrocket.
  
  
• In other games in the genre, you're mostly limited to pre-baked options for empires, some of them offering minor options for editing. And while Stellaris does have it's own pre-baked empires for you and the AI to pick from; the game practically begs for you to fill up the galaxy with your own ideas instead. Allowing for meticulous micro-managing of every facet of an empire's creation. From basic things like what they call themselves and their governing system; and expanding to much more minor and unusual options such as the names of their ship-classes, their naming scheme for leaders and ships, their city layouts, hell; they even give you an entire text box to fill up with whatever lore you can imagine for them. In terms of roleplaying: This game is built almost exclusively for it, and it works disturbingly well. Every time I finish an empire and get into the game, I'm immediately sucked in. I really feel like I'm leading this galactic power, and not some puppeteer telling Abraham Lincoln what to do or say.

• While the game's greatest strength is the progression and exploration, the endgame is where the game's tensions erode away to complete tedium. Once you reach a point where you have already researched every tech, unlocked every tradition and consumed half the galaxy by politically manipulating yourself into power that can never be legally removed from you; the game simply turns into a chore. No more events, hardly any more interactions aside from the pathetically small empires begging for you to share your tech with them ad-nauseam and no more threat, once the endgame crisis is eliminated. The next 75 or so ingame years simply spent in extra-fast-forward as you disinterestedly tab out to look at something else while you wait for the game to reach the final year and declare you the winner. I would feel as though the game would benefit greatly from a mercy-rule, where civilizations within 50-25 years of the game end that have absolutely ecliptic leads over every other empire can merely opt to take a victory and end the game.
  
  
• Waging wars, managing ship designs/loadouts and managing resources is very fun -- and locking into a violent battle with allies against a single overwhelming foe is some of the most fun I've had in any game, not just Stellaris. What isn't fun is the tiers of ships and the progression of combat. In other games, tier 1 units can still hold their own against tier 2 units, and cause some decent casualties. And if they're outnumbering the stronger threats, they can still win. But in Stellaris, the jump in power between tiers of ships is absurd. 10 tier 1 ships vs. 2 tier 2 ships might as well be a forfeit for the lower-tiers. The early game is very much just a race of "let's see who can unlock cruisers first and then immediately consume every nearby empire with their unbeatable navy." Later into the game where everyone has high-tiers is when it levels out, but if you managed to unlock titan ships meanwhile everyone is still using cruisers, they might as well surrender as soon as you show up.
  
  
• The AI is absolutely incompetent. Even when playing on the hardest difficulty, they're all completely gimped compared to you, a thinking breathing human. Paradox knows this, too. That's why multiple empires are selected at random to start with an inherent lead as a default option. Their logic is completely exploitable, allowing you to manipulate them for as many free-passes as you want. Want to make them like you and blindly trust you? Send an envoy or give them five bucks a month. Soon enough they'll blindly wage a war against their once-ally neighbors solely because you asked them to. And once both sides are weak, you can easily swallow them both. Politics with federations and the galactic community is very interesting; but with the AI it's practically free power-boosts to yourself. They have no foresight and no reasoning, and won't understand why you're asking for unlimited technology grants which give technology-based empires way more political weight. Then, once it's too late for them to stop you, you impose sanctions and tariffs on everyone else that isn't you and crush all the dissidents under bureaucratic red-tape. Multiplayer is much more fun. At least so I've heard from the rest of the Stellaris community... I don't have any friends that play this.

In closing: This game is wonderful, gets updated frequently and goes on sale often. Hold off the DLC unless it's in a sale bundle though.

If you're expecting something like Valheim; stop. Too many times the comparison gets drawn out because "muh vikings craft!" but they couldn't be further apart.

Tribes of Midgard is a roguelite game where you go on hourlong "runs" through a procedurally generated world that's pretty extensively geared around large-group play. As a solo experience, it's not the best. It feels lonely, and you always feel like you're juggling too many things at once to keep them fully balanced. The game says it "scales with player count" but only in terms of boss HP and resources you collect per-node. The map size is static and always massive in scale, with everything you want to gather sprinkled throughout and no definite direction or guarantee you'll find everything you need where you're going. You will have a very difficult time scoping out the land and finding points of interest -- or even your objectives within the fierce time limit Saga Mode puts you in by yourself or even with one or two friends. Every time night falls, you stop and defend the village. Every time a Jotunn spawns, you stop and defend the village. Because you and potentially a few other people are all that's there to do anything about the constantly-encroaching mechanics.

However; in a large group, the game immediately opens up. In a server with plenty of friends or even just randos will immediately lighten the load. Suddenly you can have teams and roles. People specializing in certain duties. Some people will be dedicated to reinforcing the village and pushing back the night-raids. Some people will hunt down the Jotunn. Some will specialize into the weather-locked zones to gather rare materials for the entire group and distribute better gear to survive the approaching winter. Everyone has a job to fulfill and you're all working towards a common goal in your own separate ways. And that's where I think the game really shines, and where I believe it makes up for it's rather unpleasant solo-experience.