User Reviews (1 - 11 of 61)

Show these reviews first:

Highest Rated
Lowest Rated Newest
Oldest Most Helpful
Least Helpful

Wretched in every way, regrettable waste of time & money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 33 / 44
Date: June 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

If you see this game laying on the street, in a perfect, factory sealed box, with a yellow post-it note saying "Free game! Take me!" Just walk way. Even the act of bending over and picking up this game will be a waste of time.

Perhaps I'm being a little facetious, but I do urge you to read all of the reviews here before considering this game. You'll find that this game's high rating has been artificially inflated by tons of glowing one and two sentence reviews, while the more in-depth reviews tend to give the game only one or two stars.

To put it simply, Galactic Civilizations is not a good game. Out of the box, the game feels much more like some sort of free-download beta than a fully produced and marketed product. The game is amateurish in almost every way and borrows heavily, yet unsuccessfully from previous games such as the Master of Orion series. For instance when you complete research on a new technology you are taken to summary screen with of all things, an animated science robot - a scene lifted directly from MOO.

Being a MOO knock-off would not be a bad thing in the least if Galactic Civilizations were not so seriously flawed in other areas. And flawed it is, in almost every aspect from government, to diplomacy, to ship building and combat - the game plays like nightmare version of MOO where everything looks good on the surface, but is summarily lacking any depth or even basic usability. A simple task like moving a ship from one area to another is needlessly complicated. Research is almost meaningless and offers more of just another pretty button to click than any sort of opportunity for strategy. Colonizing planets is equally maddening, where as the planets are simply reduced to a single number on the screen - higher the number, better. Perhaps most damning of all is the wretched ship combat system - of which there is none. Your ships meander around space, bump into an enemy ship and through tweets of the speaker are either dead or victorious. There is no opportunity to maneuver, upgrade, customize or really do anything with ships other than produce them with one click and watch helplessly as they are annihilated fifty turns later - long after you've already forgotten about them.

After you've taken a look at the option screen and automated the more boring tasks in the game, sit back, relax and get ready to click the TURN button for the next several days. That's all there is to this game... every aspect of it is completely mundane.

A bad game is one thing... and honestly, this wouldn't cause me to be so needlessly negative. After all, just because I've been playing MOO for years now and find myself jaded toward inferior products doesn't mean that some other smuck couldn't enjoy this game, right? Sure... However, a bad game that is also wracked with bugs and frequent crashes can safely be said to be enjoyable by no one using both hemispheres of their brain.

Personally, I'm always skeptical of reviewers who complain about crashes and glitches. I tend to think that ninety-percent of such crashes are due to user error. But trust me on this one - this game crashes through no fault of your own. I'm a former system administrator and I maintain my multiple computers to the highest standards. I am meticulous in keeping my software and drivers updated and using quality hardware. Further, in the past six months I've played perhaps twenty different games, most of which were much more demanding on my system than Galactic Civilizations, and while a few did suffer common glitches and occasional crashes, none came close to the sheer unreliability demonstrated by GC.

So the game crashes every now and then, what game doesn't, you ask. Usually when a game crashes, you just reload and resume from your most recent save. It's not that simple with Galactic Civilizations. The most frequent issue with this game is an abrupt "crash to desktop" failure - in fact, if you search the GC support forums you will find hundreds of posts regarding this issue. Confounding this problem is that your most recent "auto-save" will crash on you as well - making it impossible to resume your game!

Due to this problem, I was unable to complete a singe campaign - despite trying dozens of times over the course of several weeks. The only work around I can see for this problem is manually saving your game every few minutes - an act which further degrades the already low quality of the game play experience.

Often when a game experiences such a common problem the manufacturer will debug the problem and release a patch. Not so with the makers of Galactic Civilizations. Over the course of several emails with their tech support, the only solution presented was to install some spy-ware encumbered software (GC's so called "Stardock") that would some how generate an error log which I would then be required to email to them. This was unacceptable course for me and I gave up. (Indeed, to install and use this second application you have to fill out an invasive form requiring information like your age, address and other info which no one should have to give out in order to fix a broken game.)

If I could get my money back for this game, I would in a heartbeat. However, I wouldn't stop there, if I could also exact some sort of humiliating revenge upon it's creators without running astray of the law I would do that also. This game is just that bad...

Total waste of time and money

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 45
Date: September 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

After my experience with HoI and the majority of the reviews here I bought it. Big Mistake. MoO2 is by far better in terms of complexity and fun. The "decisions" you have to make, whether you want to be good or evil repeat themselves all the time and are not exciting after the first time. The research tree is bad, not documented and neglects the slightest approach of userfriendlyness. The whole setting of the game is boring and repetetive. You can only play the humans and lead them to another stunning victory over the other inferior species, so imho it is a truly fascist setting. The handling of your empire and your fleets is bad. The "battles" are abysmal. The politics are worse than in MoO2. I would not buy it again and I would not accept it as a present.

Skip this junk!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 65
Date: April 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I bought this junk thinking it would be something like good old Master of Orion only to the discover how wrong I was. Let's see:

1. Gameplay - worst elements of the games of this type combined. The designers clearly missed the point that much micromanagement is not the same as truly good control. Ships cannot be customized. Space battles are as primitive as in a game from 10 years ago! Lots of menus repeating the same useless info in different ways. Anybody who has played Master of Orion will think this game was made by Idiots Co.

2. Graphics - while some enjoyment can be found in the goofy style, the quality is one absolutely substandard for a modern game. Some of the color schemes will make your eyes blurry after an hour.

3. Fun factor - this game is no fun. I uninstalled it the next day after I bought it.

Enough said. Trust me, I would think this game is a piece of junk even if it came for free. Or, don't trust me, and find out for yourself at the expense of forty of your hard-earned dollars.

What a waste

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 40
Date: January 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This had to be the most boring game that I have every tried to play. I spent 2 hours trying to figure it out to no avial. I feel like the reviews were written by someone who was paid (I must be missing something).

So boring!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 17
Date: April 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i played this game maybe a few days and then never again. It is just plain boring. Nothing in comparison to MOO3 or civilization. I really do not understand why today the AI player is so unlogically sophisticated. Do not understand me wrong since i love a challenge. Its only that why should i want to try to outrun a car. That would not make sense!

Terrible AI won't even attack you, horrible game design

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 8
Date: August 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Galactic Civilizations is the junk food of 4x games.
It's filling and comfortably familar, but after awhile you realize it's making you sick.

It's basically what you would expect if you took every successful 4x game and merged them together, but with no regards for balance or gameplay. The feature list looks impressive, until you realize half the features are broken or unbalanced. Here's a sample game I played once I realized how broken things were:

Normal difficulty/Small Map

Right away I colonized 2 systems.
I did nothing except change research, occasionally build a building, and hit next turn. I did not build any attack/defense ships.

This went on until near the end of the research tree(!), when finally the AI attacked. I built ships to defend, but I was overwhelmed as you would expect. Then they ground invaded. Carrier of 5 million lost for them, killed 3 million of mine, repeat. Sounds bad since I only had 2 planets, right? Well unfortunately the pop of my planet they were invading was 100 billion. They couldn't conceiveably wipe me out since they couldn't make transports fast enough. Why are transports "used up" when you attack anyway?

So after a few hundred attempts they seemed to give up
then space sharks were randomly spawned. Since I had no ships they didn't attack me, and instead wiped out both the remaining ai player's fleets. I couldn't invade for the same reasons they couldn't invade me though, so I just waited to see what would happen.

Eventually I was given one of the AI's systems. Turns out I had set some money in "destabilize" a few dozen turns ago.
I pumped up the amount of money i was spending on it, to about 10% of my economy. Soon both civilizations gave me all their systems, including their capitals!!!!

So basically all you need to do to win is do nothing for a few thousand turns then put some money in destabilizing your opponent's systems and you win. That's it.

Utter junk.

A smaller, duller version of Master of Orion

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 27
Date: March 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I love 4X games. I love designing my own starships with the latest technologies, I love sending scouts out to explore and make contact with other civilizations and I like making allies. I like managing cities/planets to specialize output for my empire. I didn't get a feel for any of these preferences with this game.
There is no designing of ships in this game. Certain tech levels let you build a fixed ship design. Other techs might increase the combat values of all of your ships, but you won't have mixed tech fleets.
Exploration of the map is really quick. It took me only 1 hour of game time to explore the map and all of the systems. Although I didn't play the largest map, exploration was way too quick.
There is no real management of individual planets except for what is to be built on that planet, and there isn't much variety in what is to be built.
You can only play a human player and the only difference between different set ups is what government you start with.
The aliens don't seem interested in initiating any diplomacy, they either seem to agree to all of your deals or agree with none of them.
This game feels like a either a console game that is ported over to the PC or a real time game that was made into a turn based game to allow for "Diplomacy". It doesn't have the depth I expected from a 4X game for the PC.
If you want a detailed 4X game, I would recommend either Master of Orion 2 (Yes I said 2, not 3), or Space Empires IV instead.

Has potential but serious issues with gameplay

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 23
Date: April 17, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I like the idea of a space civ but no one has really been able to pull it off yet. There are a couple huge, obvious problems with this game.

In the name of elimination of micromanagement, they have eliminted control over resources at the planet level. There are two build queues, social and military. You set the % of resources that go to these queues and research at the civ level. So if you have 33% of the resources being spent on social projects (planet improvements), and you don't have anything to build on one planet you throw away a third of the production on that planet.

There is no printed tech tree, and you cannot find out what technologies are available or what the requirements are. All you have to go on is the name, tech type (trade, weapons, defense), and the immediate benefits. So there is no way to plan or focus your research unless you've played the game several times and have it memorized.

Both of these issues are far worse than any other game of this type I have ever seen. The first civ managed to get these right, but this game doesn't.

Read the negative reviews carefully

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 90 / 102
Date: September 15, 2003
Author: Amazon User

After buying this game, I went back and read the negative reviews more closely, and it seems to me that they are generally correct. I have loved 4x games since I played the first Civ, but this game leaves a lot to be desired. I get the impression that the designers were really focused on having a good AI (which is nice), but along the way they left out a lot of other things (which was not so nice). Galactic Civilizations seems much more like an experimental prototype for a later, more sophisticated release, rather than a fully developed game in its own right.

One thing that is completely missing is the ability to improve your territory. This is normally a big part of 4x games, and I never really realized how important it is to game play until now. During the course of the game you colonize planets, and each planet has a simple "quality score" that generally varies from 1 to 20. All planets of the same quality rating are exactly alike in game terms; you don't have some planets that produce a lot of trade resources, other planets that produce a lot of minerals, and so on. They are all just "generic planets of quality X." I think this might have been acceptable (maybe) had this game come out in 1990... but for a game released in 2003, this is just not sufficient in my opinion. The interface is also not that great... sometimes it would be nice to able to use the keypad for maneuvering your ships, rather than the mouse. However, they didn't include keyboard shortcuts for commands, so you have to constantly switch back and forth from the mouse to the keyboard, or just give up and use the mouse constantly. Also, the game lacks many customization options: for example, you always play against the same 5 alien races, no matter how large or how small the galaxy is, and you can't turn off "features" like random effects that can have a huge effect on the game. There is no multiplayer option, which was puzzling a couple of years ago when Civ 3 came out without multiplayer but is almost unbelievable now. Finally, despite all the talk about the "non-cheating AI" the fact is that the computer players start out knowing the location of all the good star systems, while you have spend quite a few turns stumbling around trying to find good spots to colonize.

Altogether I rate this as something of a disapointment: a good AI in search of a game.

Decent game, but cheesy, sloppy feel

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 22
Date: January 08, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I like some of the ideas behind this game. The sliders for setting taxation and spending priorities throughout your empire, or good-neutral-evil empire alignments and the decision making to set your empire's alignment, for example.

Unfortunately, the good ideas are wasted in a game that feels like it was slapped together by a group of programmers that were working on this during breaks from playing X-Box and drinking beer.

The graphics and sounds are cheesy, but as a 4X player it doesn't detract too much from the game (after all, I'm here for the strategy, not the pretty pictures). What does detract from the game is the crazy tech tree, the spelling errors, the cut scenes that often are simply a waste of time (even as entertainment), and the clumsy interface. The game is just too ugly.

My advice would be to wait until Galactic Civ II comes out to see if they at least spend the couple hours it would need to run the game texts through a spell check. Until then, I'd play SE IV, or even Master of Orion II (with the added bonus that MoO II can be had for $5).

Review Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next 

Actions