Impressions: Galactic Inheritors
In the mood for a 4X space sim? CrisPon Games & Argonauts Interactive are putting their hat into the ring with Galactic Inheritors. It’s got multiple races, large maps (if you want them) and tons of things to research and build. Oh, did I mention that there are space frogs? That’s kind of hilarious… and yes I’m playing them now.
Seriously though, my only gripe for Galactic Inheritors is found in the research screen. I love all the options you’ve got and there are different branching paths, but there are two somethings it doesn’t have. The first is dummy-talk. Sure I can build a hyper-space-modular-flux-capacitor on a planet… but what the crap does it do for my anything numerically or descriptively. I can gain some semblance of the idea by the paragraph, but a lot of the time I was clicking it because it was in the research tree and I wanted that stuff done sooner so I could have meaner ships faster than the other guys. The second this is that you can’t just click anywhere on it, you have to click on the scroll-bar at the bottom of the screen. Yeh yeh it’s a small gripe, but you know, when the rest of the game has the ability to click anywhere and drag around, why can’t I do that here. It just breaks the mood of a sleeping dragon ready to pounce on the rest of the galaxy… dressed as a frog.
While the races are varied, there doesn’t seem to be an overabundance of them. There are five races to choose from: the Cawlar (who I dubbed the Crawlers since I read it wrong the first time), Melowars (or the Furbies), Ribetars (the frog-people… my people), Humans (meh, but there’s a hot chick soooo…), and the Xylenth (who look like a race of warrior ant/man/crabs but aren’t warrior focused). I’m not the biggest fan of diplomacy and all that stuff so for the most part I just play the peace card while I amass my army and systematically take everyone out. It’s simple and more fun for myself. They don’t unfortunately have a race that is straight brute-force focused so I had to settle. However, thanks to a review on Steam that mentioned the space-frog race Ribetars and comparing the universe to a pond and the other races as flies to consume, the choice wasn’t too difficult for me. (You had me at consume!)
There’s not too much different when comparing Galactic Inheritors to other 4X space sims available now except with how you handle the politics and building your army. You can make peace with everyone, but you don’t just start killing them when you’re done using them for your purposes by simply attacking. You use positive and negative media to spread propaganda and eventually you can declare war. That is a drastically over-simplified description of the system that’s in place currently, but like I said, I like to kick the door in rather than find the key. This system does allow me to make peace easier and that’s nice. So the game does offer me a nice, cushy build-window where I won’t get attacked too quickly. Granted, if I played on the Hard setting, they would probably just gun for me like they do in Fire Emblem.
The last thing I want to bring up (because some people are giving it crap) is the aesthetics of the game. It’s super simplified right now and for some people that bothers the junk out of them. I’m sure, since it’s currently in Steam Early Access, that they will probably give it a revamp later on. That’s how some developers do this thing. You don’t necessarily start with photo-realistic super-complex models, you use placeholders. On the other hand, if they didn’t ever switch the models or planets to make it “look like a AAA game”, I’d be 100% fine with it. Like I mentioned with Avernum 2: Crystal Souls, it works well enough on my netbook and loads super quick when you compare it to other 4X space sims. I love that. There’s a lot of games that I cannot play on the go with my netbook, Galactic Inheritors isn’t one of them.
More Galactic Inheritors Info: Steam / Official Page / Facebook
