Review Pandora: First Contact review

[oscar]

Tags: Matrix Games; Proxy Studios; Tacticular Cancer

I try my hand at Proxy Studio's new sci-fi 4X strategy title, Pandora: First Contact, that bares more than a passing resemblance to an old favourite.



Read the full article: Pandora: First Contact review

 

[SlavemasterT]

Are the large pictures causing display/horizontal scrolling issues for anyone else?

 

[Gondolin]

Yes, they do. It's a pain in the... eye to read the review.

Also: "This seemingly obvious innovation finally allows us division of labour, instead of every city in your land having to be self-sufficient." Master of Magic did this for troop support, IIRC.

 

[felipepepe]

Hopefully this won't be our

There's no end to your last sentence...

 

[Dickie]

Hopefully this won't be our

There's no end to your last sentence...

I figured that was done for artistic reasons. Like he was showing how he feels about the game being seemingly unfinished.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The formating is a bit off in the review, i have to keep scrolling, otherwise, great review, not sure if i will get it tho, i could just as easy reinstall Alpha centauri, cheaper aswell.

 

[Mortmal]

Its not a bad game but i dontt hink its as good as alpha centaury , its more like what civ 5 is to civ 4 to be honest, missing features there and there. It seems much more war oriented than smac , there's a clear advantage when picking the military factions, especially imperium, the others dont get anything of worth. AI is ok but somewhat erratic, it can break a treaty and immediately attack for no reasons. I've seen worse than that in similar games, but that means diplomacy is to be avoided and the only way to win is to spam better military units then invade.

 

[oscar]

Shrinked the pictures down further. Solved the formatting but now the text extracts are pretty tough to read.

 

[BvG]

Shrinked the pictures down further. Solved the formatting but now the text extracts are pretty tough to read.

crop, don't resize

as for the game, i tried to play it but being more of a builder, the constant need for troop production kinda put me off... It's weird how that works, because the same problem is putting me off crusader kings II, which is after all a vastly different game.

 

[SuicideBunny]

can't read anything on the pics now. just make clickable thumbnails to big versions and it won't cause any probs with formatting.

 

[oscar]

Put links to the original sized pictures in the captions.

 

[oscar]

Bro good review.

Seems like there are innovative features (that food/production/science system is cool) but it needs more stuffing and more factions. Also are the factions like 2d parodies of the SMAC factions as they were before?

Is it moddable? How much time somebody decides to mod SMAC to it?

It's moddable. I'd say the writing and 'fluff' is actually quite solid and well-done by genre standards. Not as thought-provoking or subtly dark as SMAC and more on the lulzy side but hey, they can't have cut-and-paste SMAC's writing and ideas. I actually think the Divine Ascension (in the game's own words "a social pyramid that combines the worst parts of Facebook, Scientology and North Korea") is a more interesting and intelligent idea than the rather banal Christian fundamentalist Lord's Believers (aside from Miriam who is revealed later in the game via tech quotes to be a lot wiser than you'd have guessed).

An ambitious expansion pack would go a very long way with this title. Civ V started out quite bland and undeniably worse than Civ IV but improved leaps and bounds (if you can accept the fundamentally different one-unit-per-tile combat and anti-expansion happiness mechanic) into a very strong title in its own right with G&K.

 

[SuicideBunny]

Put links to the original sized pictures in the captions.

you seem to have slightly messed up the ending while doing that by not closing the last caption.