Developer: Kinahmi Games
Publisher: Black Shell Media
Platform: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
Galactic Conquerors – Preview
A new space game is in town, or galaxy… Galactic Conquerors is a new turn-based strategy game made by Kinahmi Games. It promises to be fast paced, have tactical gameplay and action filled battles. Battle it out in 8 player multiplayer on different platforms and destroy the other faction. Let’s check out what Galactic Conquerors has in store.
Galactic Conquerors advertises itself as a simultaneous turn-based sci-fi strategy game, which is kind of correct. But let’s have a look at the basics of the game first, which might be pretty hard for some players as the tutorial is really, really awful. The controls are the epiphany that a lot went wrong into designing them. The game features no edge-scrolling (going with your mouse to the edge of the screen to move) and for some reason if you drag your left mouse button, it pans the camera around. For an even weirder reason, multi-select is the shift key. However, this strange choice of keybinds might be acceptable for this game since it’s turn based and you don’t have to do a lot of stuff at once.
But let’s look at some other sides of the game before we continue with the gameplay. The story is pretty much non-existent (at the moment?), but that isn’t really to be expected anyway this early in the development stage.
Graphics and sound are okay, but “good enough” at best… The music gets quite repetitive as it’s the same atmospheric track over and over again and there isn’t really any soundtrack that gets you pumped or ready for battle, which doesn’t make it feel like an action game all that much. There also seem to be a lot of sound effects missing, which kind of kills the atmosphere when you finally do get into a fight without it bugging out. Graphics wise, Galactic Conquerors is pretty okay. It has simple yet nice looking graphics with pretty impressive background scenery. The sprites also look nice and effects like lasers and explosions are fairly good as well.
Let’s continue on with the rest of the game now, which isn’t all that good overall. The game begins with a pretty bad tutorial. It doesn’t give you any information, tips or hints as to how the game works. You simply get maximum resources and you’re off, which isn’t as fun as it sounds. The UI itself is pretty minimalistic and doesn’t give you a clue as to what all actions on your screen represent. In the bottom right corner you have a big “End turn” button with four smaller buttons surrounding it. The small buttons represent an army/planet overview, an overview of the solar system, a resource sharing window and an event window. Most of them are pretty useless, as you’ll usually only use the army and planet overview.
After a while you finally figure out how you have to build units in this god forsaken user interface. Then you’ll also find out that there’s actually an enemy on the map. He doesn’t seem very intimidating at first, but this game has the joy that ever unit in your army is bundled into one unit, making it look like you’re fighting three ships while there might as well be five hundred in that squad/army.
When you start delving even further into all of the buttons you can find once you expand a window, you can find some sort of tech tree to research new upgrades for your units. However, it isn’t really intuitive at all, but does seem promising if it’s improved further.
Absolutely horrible interface and user interaction aside, the actual goal of the game is to eliminate your opponent (no kidding). You’ll have to conquer planets in order to maintain upkeep for your armies. Planets also serve as a sight beacon while it’s still in your possession, allowing you to scout out passing enemies. As the description of the game suggests, Galactic Conquerors is also simultaneous turn based, which means everyone can select their moves and all of the moves are executed at the same time. This is a pretty interesting mechanic as you’ll have to predict your opponent’s moves quite heavily.
Furthermore there’s the different game modes. You can start a quick match, a skirmish or the tutorial. A quick match simply puts you in a game with bots right away while in a skirmish you can choose the map and customize some settings like amount of turns.
Conclusion
Galactic Conquerors is a game that seemed interesting at first, but was soon overruled by the horrible experience it gives its players. The graphics and sound effects are pretty nice, but all the rest has a lot to be desired. It’s riddled with bugs (which sometimes require you to just stop your game), it has a horrible user interface, user interaction and seems to be doing a lot of simple things wrong like keybinds (which can’t be changed yet). Hopefully, things will only go uphill as development continues.
No Comments