Lost Empire: Immortals
Review
Only 4999 planets left to colonize. Oh boy...
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Discovering the discoveries (cont.)
Another way of boosting research is by assigning ‘great leaders’ to the research roster. Great leaders are especially skilled individuals that can boost not only research but also other areas such as trade income, mining income and even diplomatic relations with other nations.
Not that the later is any use... The AI seems to do whatever it pleases, no matter how many gifts you send them, or demands you give into. Even the minor (unplayable) races that you will encounter will turn to hate you soon after you meet them and attack you even if you are many times their size. In short, the AI is fickle and the diplomacy system is so flawed that you will likely give up on maintaining relations with the other races completely.
Looking past the rubbish
While there is no campaign mode in Immortals, it is possible to enable ‘story mode’ when you start a new game. In this mode, two Eonians make a return, this time as Gods, giving you tasks that are geared towards taking control of the galaxy. There isn’t a whole lot to it, but it is a nice touch nonetheless.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t have many more nice touches than that. Even during the tutorial you will already notice two major flaws that are impossible to forgive. One of the first things that the tutorial asks you to do is zoom and pan. Unfortunately you can only pan forwards or backwards. There is no way to change the angle at all and you instantly notice that it is very hard to make out where your planets start and your ships end. As a result, selecting a ship or fleet can be a real pain, especially when there are several of them floating around your planet. The same is true for selecting the planet itself as you are more likely to select the fleet than the planet. This shortcoming alone is reason enough to quit playing before it drives you up the wall.
Conquering how many planets? Oh boy...
There are more design choices that are questionable at best. I love a good challenge and, for instance, play Civ 4 using the biggest available map size. Yet I couldn’t believe the size of the first maps I was dished out by the game. No less than 5000 planets to conquer and inhabit is nothing to sneeze at. And you know what, it’s just too much. Seriously. You lose track of your empire after you’ve got 100 planets. I ended up squinting at little specs on the zoomed out map, hoping to find a planet near my borders that could produce ships in a hurry. Granted, there are smaller maps, but when you open the map selection menu, it is easy to see that the focus of the designers was on large to huge sized maps.
The ship designer is worth mentioning. It is a lot of fun tweaking ships with your newly discovered technologies. Upgrading your existing fleet can be done easily by editing an existing design, saving it, and paying a fee in minerals to apply the changes to all your ships. Unfortunately, the technology is all you can play with as the ships come in set flavors and their looks, or their colors, can’t be adjusted. You can change their names but they don’t show up in the fleet overview or anywhere else, so different versions of the same basic hull design are impossible to distinguish.
Not that it really matters. Battles are handled by the game without your intervention. When two fleets meet, a small notification is shown that a battle has occurred. If you want you can see a replay of the battle in 3D, and that’s all you’ll ever see of it. Pity.
Lose this empire, it’s not worthy
My initially cheery mood disappeared soon after I started playing. I wish I could say that the game had some other redeeming factors but it would be easier to fill a page with some more bad qualities than it would be with good ones. The graphics are ‘soooo 2002’ and the I in AI surely must stand for Insignificant. Using the interface is a struggle and definitely among the worst interfaces I have experienced in the last five years.
In the end, the game is rather shallow. The depth that you will ‘sense’ when starting the game turns out to be merely an illusion that is created through a jungle of research options and more planets than you can shake a stick at. Being a die-hard fan of the genre, I have tried very hard to like Lost Empire: Immortals, but I simply can’t. I am sure that a select few of you will love the game nonetheless but I would advise anyone to give the demo a spin before shelling out your hard earned cash for this one.
5.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
