Galactic Civilizations IV

You may need a Babel Fish in your ear to understand this game.

$74.99 | PC | galciv4.com

This latest sequel in the long-running strategy series bills itself as the most accessible entry yet. This is true, in the same way that the tail is the most accessible part of a tiger. Stardock’s long running 4X series officially has a tutorial now, in the form of a little robot helper accursedly nicknamed ‘Space Clippy’. But Space Clippy doesn’t help much when a game explains everything as if it’s arrived from another dimension.

The irony is GalCiv IV is not as obtuse as it seems. It’s just terrible at communicating, which means that enjoying the game at its best involves a lot of false starts. This isn’t merely about understanding individual systems: it’s also about how key features are presented. Take the game’s biggest new idea: sectors. Rather than display its universe as one vast expanse of stars,

GalCiv IV splits the cosmos into selfcontained bubbles, connected to one another by subspace warps (aka space roads). You can play on randomly generated maps with around a dozen of these bubbles, each of which has roughly 30 stars in it. This lets Stardock proclaim

GalCiv IV to be the largest game in the series ever. Yet while visually impressive, playing at this scale isn’t all that fun. ‘Galactic’-size games are painfully slow, while ship management becomes extremely fiddly as you’re constantly having to zoom in and out to issue orders to individual fleets.

GalCiv is more fun on smaller maps. Not only does the game move faster, with empires forced to rub shoulders more, but the strategic importance of sectors becomes more acute, as those space roads connecting them turn into highways that can be monitored (although not completely blockaded) to help defend your empire.

Once you’ve parsed GalCiv IV’s garbled attempts to communicate with you, the universe feels sufficiently weird and ripe with possibility for a sprawling sci-fi sandbox. Not simply in the various races you encounter, which range from fleshly mantis-like creatures who thrive on oceanic worlds, to armies of sentient robots who don’t need food to survive, but also in the many anomalies that you can scan for minor rewards.

As your empire develops you’ll unlock a range of ‘executive orders’, special edicts that can instantly recruit a new colony ship, boost your income, or reveal a new system on the map. In a game where progress is highly gradual, these quickfire bonuses offer a satisfying immediacy.

GalCiv IV doesn’t have much of a hook compared to other space 4X games. There’s little here you haven’t seen done better in, say, Stellaris, such as the nuggets of narrative tied to anomalies. But then it’s got a legacy spanning decades. It doesn’t need your approval. It’s GalCiv.

A vast and dependable grand space strategy. But there’s little here that’s radical, and expect to meet it halfway.

Rick Lane

------