THE PEGASUS EXPEDITION
An intriguing space 4X that needs time before it’s ready to take flight
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An alien race is threatening Earth. Three major powers send fleets into space in the hope of finding a new home for humanity among the twinkling points of light in the night sky where it can thrive and build and frolic under alien suns.
What actually happens is that your fleet comes out of the wormhole in the Pegasus Galaxy (presumably UGC 12613 beloved of Stargate Atlantis fans) to find an unwelcoming star system surrounded by alien armadas. Yay!
The Pegasus Expedition is a 4X, placing you in command of a human faction, its leader making a rousing speech before blast off. Luckily, humans have jumpgate tech, so they can travel interstellar distances fairly easily, but they have little idea what’s out there, and no plan. Oh, and they’re thrust almost immediately into a war.
This is early demo code, but by the time you’re reading this the game will be out in Early Access, and what’s here now has issues. I appear to be in some sort of tutorial, though it makes little attempt to explain itself, bringing up buttons that don’t work (except End Turn) and frustrating attempts to travel and build structures until I select a fleet and right-click a different solar system to the one I was orbiting within. This simple act, so obvious in hindsight, kick-starts the entire game into a cutscene and combat tutorial as if I hadn’t already wasted six
turns. It would have been nice to have some hint that this was the right thing to do, however, like a big flashing arrow.
HORSING AROUND
I’m in charge of the European Union fleet, which means the head scientist wears a beret, and I go about my new corner of the galaxy spreading ideals of frictionless trade, a robust approach to nonmembers, and excellent bread. Unfortunately, the surrounding systems appear to be held by the Ror Clan, whose logo looks rather like that of the Klingon Empire and who follow a similar military doctrine. Which is to say that they shot first. I’m very much Greedo in this situation, to mix a sci-fi metaphor.
The Ror Clan appear hostile yet weak, so upon spotting a habitable system held by a third faction, I want to move right in. The Grand Admiral, however, attacks a ‘buildable’ but uninhabitable Ror system and I can do nothing about it. At this point, the Enter This System and Construction buttons that give access to a star’s planets still don’t work, so I’m stuck in the strategic view, repairing fleets and upgrading transit stations. This turns out to be part of the tutorial, with big flashing arrows still absent, and the game is waiting for me to fight more battles before allowing me into my own systems. Zokha has three hazardous planets and two buildable worlds, so I stick a research outpost on one.
Apparently we’re now sending the Grand Admiral to a war council with our new allies. This plays out as a static dialogue scene, but some of the planets from the strategy map decide to pop in front, which means one character gets ‘hazardous’ written across his forehead. After this, the tutorial informs me that entering a system is now available.
The 4X is a complex game, full of information tables and build queues that require gentle introduction and large flashing arrows to tell you what’s what. There’s nothing actually wrong with The Pegasus Expedition that a bit more development time and polish wouldn’t fix. It’s a nice looking game with a proven premise, it’s just, at the moment, you can bounce off it harder than a micrometeorite off a toughened glass window.
UPON SPOTTING A SYSTEM HELD BY A THIRD FACTION, I WANT TO MOVE RIGHT IN