Distant Worlds: Universe

« It's a challenging and complex game packed with features that allows you to choose just how you want to play it, while accommodating a wide variety of play-styles and strategies. »

« Distant Worlds: Universe is a corker. But make no mistake: while it’s not as forbidding as some Grand Strategy games, patience and a degree of head-scratching will be required. But it’s worth the effort. It’s enormous, complex and – above all – fun. »

« An already great game returns as one of the best space strategy games ever made. »

« An exceedingly complex, infinitely rewarding space strategy game. It’s made me more excited about the genre than any other game of its kind since Galactic Civilizations II. »

« A one-of-a-kind 4X, Distant Worlds blends epic scale and macromanagement. The Universe release doesn't bring a lot of new content, but is a nice wrap-up nonetheless. »

« While Distant Worlds may be a paragon of its style, I can only recommend it to a select few: those with beefy computers and plenty of time to really dig into the meat of this stunningly elegant and impressively wide-ranging bit of software. »

« This is a very niche game exclusively for people with a masters degree in space 4x games and patience of a stone. The UI is unappealing, horrible and convoluted. mechanics are not explained at all. Too many elements to manage: ship fuel, private economy, myriad of obscure resources you need to manage. Every menu has like a hundred items of text and drop down menus. Most things automated but what's the fun of it?!? The gameplay is just frustrating and not fun! Did the developers ever hear a phrase: less is more?!?! Also even after fiddling with the resolution the text is almost unreadable which makes it even more difficult to look at all the convoluted screens. This game should only be for die hards. I'll stick to Stellaris which is much much more accessible and fun. »

« Distant worlds is a complex and very deep game that probably is not for casual gameplay. But anyone who can step over the steep learning curve will easily find the best 4x game on the market to date. For a game that are over 10 years old it still hold up to any similar title out there. »

« This game is utterly horrible. How this game garners so high a score from critics and users is a complete mystery for me. It may have some depth, somewhere. The interface is feels like it is lifted from a Win98 game project by a grammarschool student. Diplomacy is just bad. Moving ships is eyegaugingly tedious. The economy is hidden behind so obscure mechanics you might as well study for cryptology instead. Graphicswise it is servicable, and is one of the only two pluspoints I can give it, however dont mistake this for "good" graphics. The game runs... well... it runs. It hasnt crashed, which is the other pluspoint I give. However, the gameplay is as fun as trying to trek through a swamp covered in honey and mosquitobait while swinging a waspnest over your head. It is dreary, extremely boring and filled with unlimited "Why the **** did this happen?" You can totally mess your empire up if you do not consider the strategic resources you NEED to expand. If you have none of them in the proximity of your colony, you can restart because you will stall your entire economy and spend hours looking at tiny ships trudging through what must be molasses. If you somehow get through the first part of the game, you get into the "Pop-up" hell that is the mid to lategame. You can "automate" most, if not all, of the game. However the AI is dumber than a sack of potatoes. I had gone negative according to the "cashflow", which coincidently didnt lower my cash(?), by tens of thousands of credits and the cashflow wasnt changing. I checked the maintainence and I had hundreds of troops sitting on my planets, covering the availibe continents and spilling into the oceans taking up about 100k of cash per... something. The AI decided, as I wasnt in a war, that I needed to fortify my planets by fielding an army that was double that of ALL my other opponents COMBINED. The logisticsystem is as enjoyable as having your teeth removed by a jackhammer, as you cannot influence the freighters being built, as this is handled by the ArtificalStupidity controlling the private sector. Neat idea, but outright moronic in its implementation. I had piles upon piles of resources sitting on miningstations, planets and such, but my private sector had foreclosed and had a small number of freighters, all busy trying to refuel on the other side of the galaxy, because... reasons. I couldnt build anything efficiently because the freighters was gallowanting around the whole empire looking for... I have no idea what. Fleet handling is... at best boring, and at worst just hairippingly frustrating. For example: if you have a fleet, in which one (1) ship is out of fuel. Regardless where this ship is located, the WHOLE fleet will move at a snails pace. It was easier to build a completely NEW FLEET instead of waiting for the old fleet to refuel. And beware, if you have not placed energy collectors on your fleet, and your fleet is refueling, you might be looking at a infinite refuel-loop, as the first ship is out of fuel when the last ship has refueled. No distribution of ships to other refuel points, all just go for the one THEY feel like going to and queue up there happily using up fuel waiting for the rest of the fleet. If you produce ships at a shipyard, they will be set automatically to be "automated" (yea... sure... automated), and will as soon as they complete head off to... somewhere, and while they do that they will run out of fuel and run at a snails pace... AGAIN. I found no way to easily multiselect ships and remove the automation, without either: placing them into a fleet and issuing an order, or individually selecting each and every ship and clicking "Select ship" and "Turn off automation". The diplomacy is a horrid wreck, and do not be tempted to enable the AI to handle it either. The AI will act as it sees fit. I was attacking the last planet in an empire, when suddenly my ships stopped attacking. In the middle of the last battle, in a bloody war, the AI decided to accept a peace treaty with the other faction. In a war that was WON. AND, as the enemy AI cant see reality, as I had parked a fleet above his only planet, destroyed his whole fleet, pulverized every station he owned, and was blasting his every attempt to start constructing any ship, the enemy AI offered me... ME! a peace treaty where I gave away two (2!) colonies and a couple of stations. I gave away two colonies for the privilege of a peace treaty... with an empire that was beaten into a bloody pulp... and the AI was gracious to let me live and offered me a peace treaty. I was... just staring into the screen. This didnt just happen one time but several. I cannot, in any conscience, recommend this game in any form. It is a really bad game. The interface is ghastly, the mechanics are so obscure you will rip your hair out, and the economics is rageinducing. I played for about 30-50h. Had to stop due to mental illness induced. »

« This game is strategy game about war, claim solar system, and make relationship with other other planet/solar system. The game graphic is good. The game constraint and rule is good. »

« Nice tutorial. Nice gameplay. Got destroyed by hamster aliens. 9/10 would be killed by race of sentient pets again. The only bad part about the game is it's price. »

« Coming to this game as a **** time Civ4 player looking for the perfect strategy game experience, something I could play for years and never get tired of. Learning curve is steep, you will be frustrated at first, like most 4X games. But if you pound your head through this one, and you're a fan of the genre, you will be rewarded with an extremely exceptional experience. I signed up to Metacritic just to review this game. »

« This is one of the few games that I have ever paid full price for, and I must say, it should be regarded as one of the best additions to the 4x genre ever produced. Considering the size of the development team (basically one guy), the wealth of features, and its sheer replay value, there is literally no reason that a 4x fan shouldn't pick it up. As other reviewers have noted, it has Windows UI support, which turns out to be surprisingly convenient as you can easily import/export designs and saved games. It's highly moddable, and the community takes full advantage of this, with almost every major Sci-Fi franchise represented on the official forums. The learning curve is steep, as the game has many mechanics that are not fully elaborated upon by the manual or the tutorials. Speaking of which, the tutorial is one of the reasons I decided to knock off one point, as it really does not prepare a new player for even a very easy game. In the same vein as the venerable but tragically obscure Space Empires series, users have the option to tweak their designs down to individual components on the ship. However, unlike Space Empires, you are unable to define where a component will go, only that the ship is equipped with it. But that is alright, as there are a host of other variables to take into consideration when designing. Another outstanding feature is the presence of a private sector. Rather than being forced to micromanage every tiny aspect of your Empire's economy, your spaceports will automatically build commercial vessels that do not cost anything, and yet the tax revenue generated by the trade routes they establish with other colonies, both owned by you and by the AI Empires, can be truly enormous. There is one potentially game breaking exploit though, that has yet to be resolved. You can redesign commercial vessels for the private sector, so if you equip them without any armor or weapons, your profit margins from tax revenue will predictably rise. If those vulnerable ships are destroyed? It costs you nothing, and as a bonus, those ships are "insured," meaning the AI will pump out a replacement without so much as a fuss. There are lots of other little tricks like this that can be applied to government funded ships that will send your economy through the roof and make you a galactic superpower in short order. Much has been made of the automation capabilities of the AI, and this is generally great for new players, but the AI design templates are suboptimal, so you may find yourself redesigning literally everything. Also, never allow the AI to decide how many military vessels or ground troops to build, as you will go bankrupt in short order. One other minor **** that I have is that the tech tree, while extensive, does not favor a wide variety of play styles. There is one type of late-game beam weapon, one type of late-game missile weapon, and one type of late-game propulsion, etc, that is superior to all of the race-specific unique types. This means that your ships will be mostly identical between games, and I find this unfortunate because the mid-game tech tree is actually more diverse than late-game. Either way though, I still heartily recommend this game, because even though it may look graphically outdated, and doesn't have multiplayer, it stands well above its AAA rivals and mostly rewards a cerebral, rather than formulaic approach that is so unfortunately common amongst its more graphically pleasing peers. If the caveats I listed above don't seem like a deal breaker to you, then I guarantee you that this game will be on your hard drive for years to come. »

« I was a new player for Distant Worlds and i gave up after watching more than 6 hours of crappy tutorials & gameplay. I didn't even managed to folow 1 of those from the start, because the development progresses differently during gameplay. The game is over documented like a 30 yo text base game, and doesn't show new players what it's all about. To me it seems like some programmer is trying to create a game that cannnot be understand by normal people who love space games, he's just trying to annoy us ! Well, SCREW THIS WANNABEE SPACE GAME, it has lost me ( and i'm sure a lot more people ) »