Galactic Inheritors

The Steam Summer Sale is an evil plot an excellent opportunity to try the games you were curious about or didn't want to pay full price for. It's been my chance to pick up some of the 4X space games that have come out recently.

First up is Galactic Inheritors.

This is a cool and innovative little game. Some of the traditional mechanics are bare-bones, and the overall turn-by-turn flow is a bit clumsy, but the new stuff is interesting. In particular, your military ships are built by contract with private companies, and each company "levels up" on a skill tree; you can thus specialize each company in one area, though they only gain "XP" from building ships and ships are a big investment.

All in all, this game felt like something that I could get involved with and dig into, except for two factors. One is that the main screen color scheme is hard on the eyes - the grainy white background, like that of Distant Worlds when zoomed out only more so, is a short trip to eye fatigue. I think it's supposed to be a negative image of a starfield, but it doesn't succeed.

The other thing that led to short shrift for Galactic Inheritors is that Galciv 3 came on sale only a couple of days later. While I've had mixed opinions of the series, the appeal of playing a game with professional levels of usability design and thorough testing, and all the features I like most in a space 4X, was to much to resist. More on Galciv 3 shortly.