3.5/5 ★ – sirvalkyerie's review of Master of Orion: Conquer the Stars.

Is it good? Kinda. Is it bad? No. Is it worth playing? Maybe. The graphic quality is quite nice, so let me start by giving that a shout. The species screens and the planet menu views are very pleasing. Very pleasing. The races are interesting and while they follow fairly stereotypical archetypes they're well designed and unique enough compared to other games and narratives. The GNN updates are funny, informative and also pretty high quality. The game itself is rather simple. Plays more like a simpler Civ than it does other space 4x games. It's not bad by any means, it's just not especially engaging. If you like the idea of Civ but easier and in space you'll probably get along with this well. If you've ever found Endless Space to be too complicated, this may also be for you. It's certainly not a bad game. If you like 4x games it's worth some time. But I wouldn't pay anywhere close to full price. There's just not enough. Not enough meat, not enough to sink in to, not enough to care about. Planets aren't interesting enough or distinct enough. There's a billion to settle, no real maluses for settling too many or too close to one another so it doesn't really provide interesting interplay or choice. You just settle every planet you can manage to settle that's near you and juggle whatever maluses it may or may not get against the bonuses they provide. You can pretty easily move pops around which is fantastic but it also means that there's never a time where it'd be worth not settling a planet. Because if it grows too large to support itself you just ship citizens off that planet to another one that can take them. If it grows too slow you just bring pops to it from elsewhere. Techs and such are similar. When you have a million settled planets any of them can build ships meaning that you don't have to make interesting choices between building armies and building other buildings. You can churn out ships from some subset of planets while doing research on others and farming on others. This is pretty cool and rewarding but it also means the choices feel fake. Your empire can fill every need all of the time. In Civ you may have a city that simply cannot grow enough food so you'll need to constantly provide it with trade routes from your cities that do grow food. Which means you have less trade routes with external civs that produce better trade value. You may not be able to settle a city in a certain spot because it'll never be able to grow enough citizens to work enough tiles to be productive. And you can't simply import and export your pops. So now you have to be more selective on where you settle even though most of the map is theoretically settle-able. In Stellaris, most of the map just flat out isn't inhabitable at all (for better or worse) until quite late into the game. So where you do settle and where you can settle are either important decisions early on or they're no brainers to they're aspirational things you're attempting to achieve. In Master of Orion you're just spamming colony ships from one planet while building your army on another and building every money-producing and research-producing building you can elsewhere. The specialization is nice and friendly to the player but comes at such little expense that you're just clicking everything for the sake of everything without being met by any challenge, passive or direct. The casualness of this is welcome. And it is a positive. But it is also the reason why you'll have a time limit on MoO. At some point you're gonna get bored. You're gonna play your third playthrough and realize there's no more depth to it. There's nothing more waiting for you. No tricks or special events left. The real sin is the lack of anomalies or events or sense of the unknown that comes from the exploration phase of most 4x games. Instead you just wind up with kind of nothing. And I really mean that. The individual planets have no real character or special effects nor are there any interesting things to find on the map like Stellaris's anomalies and archaeological sites or Civ's tribal villages and natural wonders. A game as wide as a universe and shallow as a rain puddle with some pretty set dressings. It's cool. It's worth a visit if you're a fan of the genre. It's not a mold breaker or a must play.