Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello

**Doom** · 06-24-15, 04:42 PM

[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]

Galactic Inheritors review by Rick Moscatello
Rough around the edges, empty center

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_tradingcard_races_humans-jpg

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_tradingcard_races_humans-jpg

Galactic Inheritors is a “4x” space game, where you pick a race that’s just discovered space travel, then explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate everything else in the galaxy to win.

These games are invariably compared to the genre-defining Master of Orion, but Galactic Inheritors more fairly compares to an even older game, Reach for the Stars (from 1983, and did I just give away how long I’ve been playing games?). Galactic Inheritors is a very simple game, but this isn’t a bad thing. Modern space 4x games have focused on ever more complexity (leading to steep learning curves) and forays into real-time play (leading to headaches as you try to manage a space empire and multifront battles in real time).

Galactic Inheritors focuses on simplicity as a primary design choice, and keeps it all in a turn based format in a single player only game. Fair warning: this is a Steam Early Access game, so there are lots of rough spots. It doesn’t crash or anything, but there are plenty of typos and a few gaps where…something…should go. That’s the short review, let’s take a closer look:

The game begins by picking races, and the lean design hurts here. There aren’t that many races, and they have nothing to make them feel different. Each race gets a % bonus or penalty to research, growth, or whatever. I really think if I’m a giant frog, or an insect, as opposed to a primate, that might provide some civilizational differences beyond a few percentage points here or there.

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_event-jpg

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_event-jpg

It's the universe. Stuff happens.

You also select universe size and shape. The universe is a collection of stars in a two-dimensional plane, connected via paths (a primary conceit of this genre)—control of choke points is key to expansion as well as military conquest. The worlds/star systems you colonize and conquer are fairly simple. Each is rated for basic potential industrial/commercial/research growth, but your research quickly makes these basic ratings nearly irrelevant. There are also special resources that you can exploit, but, again, they don’t do much. In addition, some systems have very special resources…but these take so long to exploit that the game is usually over long before you’ve built up a system enough and decided to dedicate it to the 100 turns or so needed to build on the resource…the game doesn’t even tell you what you’ll get for all that (it’s irrelevant).

One of the big parts of this genre is research, you’re not taking over the universe with pellet guns, after all. The research tree is very lean, of course, and is the same for all races, the same every game. Nothing in the tree really changes much, beyond the military parts of the tree which provide access to larger ship chassis.

Combat is simplicity itself: when ships of opposing factions meet, they blast at each other automatically, with the losing ships retreating (the whole battle is resolved instantaneously).

These, and a few other basics, were all perfectly good ideas for 4x games in 1983, so let’s focus on the two actually new ideas in the game:

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_media_options-jpg

Galactic Inheritors review, by Rick Moscatello-gi_media_options-jpg

Send in the students!

First is diplomacy. You can’t just willy-nilly declare war on a neighbor and invade away. Your people must be swayed to war first. So, you must engage in extensive PR campaigns, slandering the enemy in every conceivable way (“They don’t respect sentient rights!” “They incur on our borders!” and so on). This process can take several dozen turns, more if they’re engaging in positive PR with you (eg, student exchange programs). I totally grant diplomacy in most games of this sort is awful, but the game totally misses an opportunity here. This is realistically how humans initiate war, but this would have been a good place to differentiate the races. A hive mind might well just up and declare war, while cat-people might have a “cute kitten” diplomatic maneuver that keeps the peace. Still, big props for the designers for doing something interesting, at least.

The second big idea is ship building. You have three corporations that build ships, and each can build up to three ships at a time (that’s plenty). There is no “gold”, just a commerce rating that limits ship production. As you use a corporation, it gains experience points, which you can spend to improve ships built by that corporation. Naturally, you’ll have one corporation focus on small ships, another on larger ships, and another on even bigger ships, perhaps, but the point is still, this is a very different way of doing things. All warships appear on your starting system, again to give an idea of how simplified things are (your systems only build colonizing and exploration/exploitation ships, which aren’t built by the corporations). If the combat system weren’t so lean, it’d be more obvious if the appraoch actually makes a difference, but at least this is a start.

The overall interface is very slick. You’ll quickly get the rudiments down, and turns take seconds to play out, even in middling-sized empires. Warning notices pop up to let you know if any fleet is missing an order, any system isn’t building something, any diplomatic concerns require attention. After playing many games where it’s too easy to lose track of a fleet or something, I really appreciate how easy it is to keep track of it all here.

Galactic Inheritors is not a deep game, but it is a well designed, if very simple, game. It would have won major awards if it came out thirty years ago, but probably won’t satisfy veterans of the many innovations in design since then. If the developers continue to improve the game (particularly the far too dull universe and too simplistic combat), there may be a great title in here…but it’s still a decent title, good for a few plays.