Space Empires IV Review

Could you ever understand chess players (this is supposed to be a rhetorical question, hence I'm not interested in hearing your answer, and being a passionate chess player, I guess that is for the better)? Two maniacs, who spent most of their lives looking at books with famous chess moves in stuffy chess clubs, spending up to four hours in front of that black and white board, moving their pieces and nervously looking at the little flags, whilst mumbling incoherently. An ignorant observer might conclude that the scene was lacking a pair of straitjackets, yet a keen eye may sense the scale of the war that is taking place here. The devious knight moves, tower sieges, and sacrifices, with only one thing in mind - unconditional victory (Get laid soon - Ed). The imagination may make these games seem more interesting than baseball matches (Get laid soon - Ed).

A whole lot of stats.

Space map.

Imagination had also been responsible for the enjoyment we took in the old computer games some fifteen years ago. We didn't need any motion capturing, skeletal animations or digitized pictures to recognize our favorite soccer players in those couple of pixels, and the feeling you got from Pit Stop was just as good as winning a game of the latest edition of Need For Speed. The modern technology striving towards some virtual reality that would look the same as the real thing, hence killing our need to imagine, spoiled us. We pay less heed to the good games that don't bring virtual worlds, and require us to employ our long forgotten imagination in order to unveil all their potentials.

Malfador Machinations counted on its faithful fans and hoping that the stupid gaming consoles didn't kill the imagination in everybody, continued their Space Empires serial. The first three parts were shareware, and Shrapnel Games published the fourth part. The entire project was courageous - It's not that the guys from MM (stands for Malford Machinations) didn't have anything new to present; it's just that this game is unlikely to become a big financial success.

Space Empires IV is a turn-based control sim. You find yourself leading one of the twenty available races with no introduction, and you have to do your best to eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate until you rule the entire universe. Masters of Orion 1 and 2, and Imperium Galactica 1 and 2 made this genre famous, and Space Empires IV is taking the next evolutional step. The authors disregarded anything and everything that couldn't be considered essential for this genre, and made a game rich in options and commands, whose versatility provides utter non-linearity, while at the same time being an audiovisual disaster. This is the main reason why only the chosen few will get to like it.

This is not a game meant to relax you after a hard day's work, and you can see that as soon as you start it. You can assume control of one of the twenty available races, but the real challenge would be to create your own race that would suit your own style of play. This is as good as creating characters in an RPG. This is where you can feel the full configurability of this game, as you can set anything you want, from the name of your race, type of society and your title to the type of atmosphere your race finds most suitable. You'll get to distribute trait points and modify race's base characteristics so that the militant races take advantage of all possible combat bonuses, and scientifically bent nations reach new technologies more quickly. There are more than thirty traits to set, so it would be futile to describe all possibilities here. The limited number of bonus points will make you choose your race's preferences, and prevent you from creating too powerful a race which would have all technologies "unlocked." This means that even when you completed the game with one race, it's still worth playing it with another because each race will give you a unique experience and unique set of technologies. You will have little trouble in altering the game graphics and change the generic battleships into the crafts from your favorite series and movies.

Interface seems very confusing at first sight. A lot of data, symbols and numbers may not encourage you to play, but if you sustain the first couple of hours, you'll realize that was the best way to organize it. All options are in proper place and logical order, letting you run your space empire regardless of weather it covers ten or a thousand planets. Space is your battlefield, (containing hundreds of planets) and as it gets randomly generated before the start of each game, you'll hardly ever play on the same terrain twice (unless you're very persistent and intend to live for some four thousand years).