Galactic Civilizations 3

Anyone who's played the classic strategy game Civilization will find instant familiarity with Galactic Civilizations 3.

In this game, you control a newly-minted space-based civilization and compete against a bunch of other civilizations that also just happen to have gained the ability to build interstellar space ships at exactly the same time as you. You view the galaxy from a god-view perspective (with a fog of war), and control the production of your planets and movement of your space fleets.

I played for about 10 hours before I got bored and stopped.

THE GOOD:

• The graphics are really nice, from realistic-looking black holes to nebulas.
• It has pretty cutscenes and animations.

THE BAD:

• The game is boring. Turn after turn, you micro-manage a bunch of little things like building projects on planets, deciding what ships to build, upgrading ships, and sending your scouts to pick up space junk. Each turn bleeds into the next, and your main reward for a job well done is more micro-management. I felt no real sense of tension, progress, or accomplishment.
• Combat is poorly done. It's fully automated, and the recorded battle sequences are kind of wonky. There's no good camera angle for seeing what's happening. It was not clear to me at all what the different ship roles would do or how to combine them in any meaningful way. The fleet sizes are too small to enable you to apply a strategy.
• The controls are clunky, with lots of unnecessary clicks and confusion over where to find things.
• It's hard to tell when the game has moved on to the next turn.
• It annoys me when a science fiction game feels the need to invent new physical elements like "Durantium" or "Elerium" (the latter of which was clearly a nod to X-Com). The real life universe is made up the same old matter we're familiar with here on Earth. Inventing new materials is unnecessary and confusing.
• The built-in tutorial is terrible. It's structured more like an advertisement than a learning guide. It's virtually useless at explaining anything you need to know. I searched randomly online and the first tutorial I found explained the game much better—even full of spelling errors as it was.

THE UGLY:

• In the technology menu, there is this horrible robot dancing around all over the place. It's incredibly distracting and makes it really difficult to focus on the text.
• Even in my short amount of play time I encountered several user interface bugs. For example, when I had a Commander in my fleet, I often couldn't merge new ships into the fleet even though there was room.
• There is a lack of female representation among the aliens and characters.