The 2016 reboot of Master of Orion kind of shoots itself in the foot a bit with its own subtitle: "Conquer the Stars". When I play 4x games, I like to feel like I'm really building an empire, managing an economy, and conducting diplomacy. All of those things are present in Master of Orion, but I've gotten a pretty distinct feeling that this is yet another strategy game that falls victim to military rushing being the optimal strategy by far. Master of Orion doesn't really want you to build a civilization and colonize the galaxy; it firmly wants you to do what its subtitle tells you: conquer the stars.

Master of Orion III was kind of shit (it was boring, ugly, and completely lacked personality and substance), but at least it made some effort to be new and interesting. Most noticeably, the galactic map was actually three-dimensional. Sure, this was a navigational and UI nightmare for the human player, but it required players to think differently about how they approached expansion and warfare. At a more fundamental level, MoO3 sought to be a game about macro-management, asking the player to manage a vast galactic empire rather than just a collection of a dozen or so planets. The meat of the game, thus, was intended to be in the mid-to-late stages, as developed empires engaged in epic battles for survival, rather than all the fun and challenge being front-loaded in the early rush to colonize all the nearby planets. It didn't work, but at least it was trying to genuinely innovate the 4x genre.

The new Master of Orion isn't anywhere near that ambitious, and seeks instead to simply bring the original Master of Orion concept (in its simplest form) into the age of high-resolution 3-d graphics. It's a scaled-down, bog-standard space-4x game that borrows heavily from Endless Space and Civilization V. But it is at least a competent one!

Conquer the Stars isn't as big, complex, or ambitious as Master of Orion 3, but at least it's competent.

The galaxy itself isn't very big this time around. Depending on the map's size, there's only a few dozen stars, and most of them only have two or three planets. Unstable star lanes and space monsters can lock you out of exploring certain systems until you research certain technologies or grow your military sufficiently large (respectively). Other than that, exploration is over fairly quickly (especially once you start performing map trades in diplomacy).

Planet-management is also fairly easy. You can assign population meeples between one of three different types of output: food, production, and research. Meeples of different jobs and races have different icons, and unhappy meeples on strike have icons that sit down holding a picket sign. It makes it very easy to see what your population's current status is at a glance. There's just not really much to do with them. You don't have to assign them to work specific buildings, and with only 3 outputs to manage, balancing or specializing isn't that difficult.

All the buildings in the game are also one-time builds that don't serve much function other than to provide flat points of one of the three outputs, or to modify the efficiency of meeples in a particular output category. Buildings that have unique functionality (such as the Spy Center, Gravity Generators, or Interplanetary Administration) are few and far between. The only other thing that you do with your planets is to occasionally terraform them in order to boost your max population and unlock additional slots along each of the output tracks.

Each point of population is of a specific race, which affects the morale of conquered planets.

The tech tree also feels kind of bland and linear. I would much prefer a tech web along the lines of Civilization: Beyond Earth. Master of Orion kind of goes in this direction a bit by including some techs in which you have to chose which of two different items you want to take when you research certain techs. You can then trade for the other via diplomacy if you want to. It's kind of like the leaf nodes in Beyond Earth, but only some techs have them, and I rarely had to think too hard about which one I wanted...

I never really hopped onto the Assassin's Creed bandwagon when the first one was released in 2007. The historical setting and gameplay concepts were intriguing and I wanted to play it, but I wasn't sure if I would like it enough to warrant an outright purchase. And since Ubisoft never bothered to release a playable demo on the PlayStation Network, I never played the game.

So I missed the first two games and their various spin-offs. But when I started seeing information about the third game, and its setting during the American Revolution, my curiosity piqued. The trailers made it look as though parts of the game were played during large-scale battles, and I thought that would be really cool to play. So when I found that a friend (Huh?Mr.Box!) was willing to let me borrow his copy, I decided to give it a chance.

And boy was I disappointed!

My core complaint with Assassin's Creed (and many other games like it) is that I don't like how dumbed down the controls are, and how little actual control the user has. The run button is also the "climb" button and sometimes the "jump" button (even though there is a dedicated "jump" button). I've always held that when a single button does everything, then it really does nothing. Assassin's Creed regularly feels like I am not playing the game; a procedural function created by the developers is playing the game.

Instead of the game just doing what the player tells it to do, it has to determine which of several pre-determined context-sensitive actions the developers decided to pre-program. You might want to try to sprint through a narrow alleyway between two close buildings to chase a courrier, but if you're just a few pixels off, you end up jumping up the side of the wall and climbing to the top of the building. And then it's a pain in the ass to get back down, and the courrier is now two blocks away.

Because I wasn't lined up perfectly, the free run forces me to climb up this building,
when all I really wanted to do was chase the courier through this alley way.

Maybe I want to jump off of a building onto a nearby tree branch in order to stay above a group of enemy Redcoats that I'm trying to stealth past. But for some reason, the game decides to make my character leap past the tree branch and right into the middle of the group of bad guys. Now my cover is blown, I'm stuck in combat, and maybe I've even failed a bonus objective or two.

These sorts of problems could be avoided if the "climb" and "jump" commands were their own buttons separate from the "run" button...