Sandra Prior

Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor

This particular twilight makes the Galactic Civilizations II strategy universe burn brighter than ever. A game for veterans and newcomers.

With this second expansion pack, turn-based space-epic strategy game Galactic Civilization II puts more strain on your system than ever. Not your computer though - in fact, some of the new coding makes the game run in a far smaller memory footprint. So how many hours can you sit clicking spaceships and distant colonies? A worrying number. When 'Just one more turn' becomes 'I'm sure I can last another turn before my bladder ruptures', you know you're playing with high-class addictiveness.

In short: this is a seriously impressive expansion, which includes as much content as most true sequels. There are few areas which aren't expanded determinedly. The more efficient code is married to a graphical uplift, with new textures making the older models far more attractive - which seems almost extraneous when looks weren't really the point. Content is king here, and there's so much new stuff it's difficult to pick what to cover. From the enormous Terror Stars to fulfill your terrible planet-killing fantasies, to the new victory condition of Ascension (maintaining control over crystals for a period of time to win), a new campaign (of almost puzzle-like missions, instead of the usual open skirmish play sprawling epics) to an even larger map size for your month-long epic games.

But the most unprecedented change is that each of the twelve pre-generated civilizations has its own tech tree. Given that there's over a hundred techs to develop for each, this is enormous. Most are shared, but even then the development - as in, what you have to research to get them - can differ considerably. Also, each of the unique techs bring a race's character right to the fore - for example, the monstrous Drengin have Slave Pits rather than traditional factories, which are great at what they do, but reduce your reputation throughout the galaxy making it hard to come to cultural dominance... so you naturally, and very Drengin-like, turn to war.

The only thing keeping this out of the nineties is a few bugs throughout - mainly presentation ones with misaligned text buried in some of the tech trees and more-regular-than-usual crashes (the autosave every turn and quick booting keeps the annoyance to an absolute minimum, however). Otherwise, this is a strategy tour de force. For both veterans and newcomers, it's an ideal time to start a galactic empire.

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