Recent reviews by Euan

Very fun little game. The staggered tutorial does an excellent job of making it easy to understand the mechanics and how the different races act and interact, and there's still a lot of depth to play in. Fairly short compared to a lot of other strategy games (eight planets, with no breakdown of area beneath "planet"), but there's a high replayability factor from trying different approaches and having different races be "first landing". As others have noted, you're a lone diplomat in this one - all your efforts are through diplomacy, but that will sometimes be gunboat-flavoured.

The Betrayal gamemode DLC doesn't have a lot of replay to it (you're out to paint the map) but *is* rather cathartic after having to deal with bickering races doing stupid things and adds some fun planet-management mechanics. Certainly the closest to classic strategy games.

Invasion (the other DLC gamemode) is interesting, as whilst it's relatively easy to get the various races to agree to attack The Deadly Invaders™ the difficulty really lies in having them be strong enough to win, and agree to help protect each other. The resulting Federation, though, feels probably the most natural all-races one of them all.

Highly recommend playing, especially if you can pick it up on sale.

Far more about the politicing than the combat, a good adaptation of Old World of Darkness to PC. The unofficial patches also result in good support of recent hardware. Well worth playing.

Good in short doses - repeated games get a bit repetitive, but the tongue-in-cheek ruling over a banana republic is great fun.