Space Empires 4 Review

I've been on a personal quest to find the best video games we can shrink our collection down to.  A recent one somebody suggested was Space Empires 4.  I was looking to combine Sins of a Solar Empire with Civilization 4 and replace an old game I enjoyed called Masters of Orion II.  I searched online about it and found next to nothing in way of reviews so I thought I'd add one more to the billions of web pages out there and hopefully it will help someone who is looking for information on it.

It was released in 2000, so I expected it to be decent, but it felt very much like one of those early 90s RTS games (like Outpost, Dark Reign, Masters or Orion).  The graphics were simple enough, which wasn't bad, but it was more the play style and the user interface, which caused me to loose interest.

The interface had me constantly guessing.  It had it's own style of control which was as pain because games are pretty much standardized with controls.  Things like right click to move units or cause the default action, one left click to select things.  I felt like I had to click three or four times to do what one click should be able to do.  It got old fast because I wasn't willing to learn a whole new interface at my age.  :)

The play style was pretty close to your traditional 4x conquer the galaxy games but it had a lot of small quirks that really didn't need to go there.  I built a colony ship, sent it to the planet, and then I couldn't build anything.  Turns out you need to also send colonists over with your colony ship.  I guess that makes sense but that means several more steps before I can have my colony up and running and just adds to the list of things I might forget to do to makes the game more frustrating.

Also the tech tree bugged me.  Instead of a list of available technologies you can research it just has tech levels in like 20 different categories.  If you want to get a specific tech you're left trying to guess what the programmers thought it should be categorized under, and often you need a specific level in several categories.  That leaves you having to refer to complicated tree diagrams online to try to get what tech you want instead of just telling the game to research what you want.

The battles felt very unbalanced and that one tech always dominated, and if you don't happen to know what tech that is then you've lost.  What's the point of having hundreds of ship components when only one is worth using?

Basically unless you're a big fan of the game category, avoid this one.