A really ingeniously designed neo-roguelike/strategy game, and one of the few games I've ever seen people write elaborate chess-style treatises about & argue about the efficacy of different strategies ten years down the line.

It's quite complicated, and is to a certain extent not quite what it looks like on the box--I myself was a little caught off guard by the winning strategy being "murder as many people as you can, if at all possible personally"--so I don't blame anyone who can't get into it. But for me, it really scratches an itch that nothing else ever has, in that it really makes you feel like the commander at the bridge, giving orders to divert power from engines and slamming your fist down on the arm of your chair when that one-in-a-million shot hits you anyway, but where it's also a game that's at its heart about slow, carefully thought-out tactical and strategic decisions, rather than the combination of reflexes and split-second gut decisions games where you're running a ship are usually like.

Reviewed on Mar 29, 2022


Comments