Stellaris

Best Space strategy game I've ever played. Its a game that **** you in and keeps pushing you to play for one more hour.

This is a very decent game, although I don't like the art style and the look of the game characters, they look very weird and bizarre. Some game mechanics are bugged and not optimized for years. For example, if you run trading based empire the level of piracy is just insane, etc. But overall I think this is a decent game, not great, but decent.

This game is pretty hard to get started with, but it keeps you interested ...

An interesting game to play on the Xbox Game Pass for a few afternoons, but not much longer than that. It was fun figuring the game out, peeling off more and more layers of the game mechanics, then managing planets, assigning planets' "pops" to jobs in order optimise various outputs. But after working this out and winning a few systems in my first ever war, I did not see a reason why I should keep on playing. I already knew what the game would be like: a "rinse and repeat" cycle of optimising resource output, upgrading fleets, waiting for the truce to expire before winning a couple more meaningless systems in another meaningless war. A major problem with this game is its theme: there is none. The sci-fi veneer is quite poor. We know nothing about the species that are available to play, there is no story, they are completely random (in fact, I believe they *can* be randomised). Which makes interaction with AI opponents a dull affair, in which you only care about their strength relative to yours. The systems are all pretty much identical except for their resource output and the colour of the star, so I explore them only because I have to, not because I'm genuinely interested to find out what's round the corner (first encounter events were fun though). It is different from other comparable games: in Civilization, for instance, discovering edges of the continent, strategic resources, natural wonders, city-states all matters and makes exploration interesting. In Europa Universalis or its spin-offs like Crusader Kings you don't really discover anything but you play on the real world map, which adds meaning to your conquests: it's more fun to say "I conquered France" than "I won 6 star systems, all identical and randomly generated". It doesn't help that planets suitable for colonisation are fairly rare and a great majority of systems are empty points on the map which you can't do anything interesting with, other than mine them for resources. The game is horrifically time consuming. I did not finish my game, I abandoned it in what I believe was early mid-game, to which point I got after spending maybe 15 hours. You could finish a infamously lengthy RPG game like The Witcher 3 or watch all 11 seasons of Modern Family in the time at this rate it takes to finish a single game of Stellaris. And you'd have way more fun doing so.

stellaris is a typical paradox game, with all the good and bad aspects related. it is a complex, vast 4X game with some new interesting concepts in the field. on the other hand, it is underdeveloped, still full of bugs. it is not even worth to start to play years after the release and after the many patches issued, cos it is sold as open beta - modable, but not to the degree you may fully rectify some heavy bugs. recently, i resigned to play, cos developer makes new DLCs with bright new bugs keeping the old ones. i fell in love with the game concept, but definitely not with its realisation, no matter how hard i tried (1000+ hours played).