MOSTLY HARMLESS

You may need a Babel Fish in your ear to understand GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS IV

- Rick Lane

This latest sequel in the long-running strategy series bills itself as the most accessible entry yet. This is true, in the same way that the tail is the most accessible part of a tiger. Stardock’s long-running 4X series officially has a tutorial now, in the form of a little robot helper accursedly nicknamed ‘Space Clippy’. But Space Clippy doesn’t help much when a game explains everything as if it’s arrived from another dimension.

Take modules as an example. What are modules, you ask? Well, so did I. At first I thought modules were optional extras you could select to tailor your starbases (which act as both resource harvesters and deployable control points, with modules helping improve those functions in various ways). But then I ran out of modules, whereupon I realized they are in fact a consumable resource. Yet unlike almost every other resource in the game, which are either harvested in space or produced on planets, modules are constructed at shipyards. Oh, and you can only construct modules once you’ve researched the relevant technology, itself an issue for reasons I’ll get into later.

As with many other systems, GalCiv never properly explains any of this. Space Clippy just points you to various menus like a dismissive waiter in an alien restaurant. The irony is GalCiv IV is not as obtuse as it seems. It’s just terrible at communicating, which means that enjoying the game at its best involves a lot of false starts.