Featured Content

Galactic Civilizations 2: Dark Avatar (PC)

• Developer:
• Publisher: Stardock
• Genre:
• Official Website: http://www.galciv2.com
• Score: 5 of 5: Purchase

Just... one... more... turn. No other four words could better sum up the experience of playing the original Galactic Civilizations 2 and now its expansion pack, Dark Avatar. You can almost picture tiny little Oompah-Loompahs slaving away in some arcane game development laboratory, infusing each boxed copy of GalCiv 2: Dark Avatar with pure gaming crack and gleefully singing those creepy little songs that they like to sing so much. Yes, it's just that good and just that fun.

Stardock, makers of the original Galactic Civilizations and its recent superb sequel, were clearly not content to rest on their well-earned laurels as this eagerly awaited (for good reason) expansion pack shows. Many fan-requested options and additions made the cut in this new addition to the franchise, and the game is even deeper and more robust for it.

The easiest thing to praise is the graphical ‘shine' that the entire game exudes, so we'll start there. It's hardly a risky claim that GalCiv 2: Dark Avatar is easily the best-looking turn-based space strategy game around. Yes, in full disclosure mode, I'll admit that there aren't too many of them around these days, so let me amend that prior statement - Galactic Civilizations 2: Dark Avatar is one of the best-looking games around, period. Bells and whistles usually reserved for First-Person Shooters or high-profile RPGs, like shader effects and crisp anti-aliasing, make an appearance here, and the game's simply stunning as a result of the effort. Colorful nebulas swirl in the background, a myriad of sparkling stars lend credence to the setting, and fully-detailed planets actually rotate on their axis along with their associated moons, which themselves slowly revolve around their home planets. The ships themselves glitter, gleam, and bristle with realistically high-tech components and those aforementioned uber cool shading effects. Your AI opponents are artistically interesting and fairly diverse, though they still tend to suffer from that whole human-like Star Trek alien syndrome. The UI is completely moddable and futuristic-looking while being well-organized and useful to boot. To put it in basic terms, every artistic portion of the game has been well-polished.

Frequently, in titles from smaller developers (no offense Stardock), sound design and/or quality is the first department to suffer, but in GC2: DA (abbreviated out of necessity) that isn't the case. From the opening Menu's hauntingly beautiful aria to the quirky music during the actual game itself, it's obvious that even the sound design is crisp and appealing. The only sound-related complaint that I could muster is that I wish there was a bit more music and sound in general for different portions of the game. Yet, despite the musical repetition in portions of the game, it's a testament to how pleasant it is that it never seems annoying.

But what about the real meat of this expansion pack - the new additions, changes, and tweaks? It's all here and in spades. Conveniently most of the new features are, in fact, entirely optional. This is design for the gamers by gamers, and it's a welcome breath of fresh air in an industry that (all too frequently) develops what they want and how they want it, and you'd better like it because it's all about their vision rather than your fun. Stardock Entertainment and its head honcho, Brad Wardell, understand that putting the gaming power back into the hands of the very people buying their games is the smart thing to do.

Now about those new features...there's everything here from new maps and a new campaign to new units, ship parts and anything in between. This is an old-school, huge expansion pack that completely revamps and changes the original game in numerous positive and depth-enhancing ways. Starting with the new campaign where you play as the evil Drengin Empire, you face-off versus a much worse version of yourself in the form of the evil Korath (a sub-genus of Drengin that's even more unpleasant than the originals). Your mission is to halt their galactic extermination plans so that you can enslave the rest of the galaxy's races instead. The campaign is loads of fun and every bit as engaging as GalCiv 2's original Dread Lords campaign. Furthermore, playing from the perspective of the dastardly Drengin really adds some flavor to what could have been just another vanilla campaign.

If you just want to play a quick scenario (of which there are several new ones available), you can actually use one of the cool new features to create your own opponents, complete with special powers and unique traits and abilities as well as their own specific ship types. Ever wanted to match up the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica against the dreaded Robots of Crikkit from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series? Now you can. Even the AI is adjustable, and on that particular note, it's worth mentioning that GC2: DA continues the original's strong tradition of excellent, non-cheating AI. A certain portion of GalCiv 2's fan base has decried the game's lack of Multiplayer, but really with AI this good and this enjoyable, playing against a human opponent is almost unnecessary.

Some of the new additions to gameplay include the addition of harvestable asteroid belts and covert agents who can plant themselves on enemy planetary improvements, such as an Entertainment Center meant to boost morale, and cancel out those positive effects unless your foe spends one of his own precious few agents to nullify yours. The tech tree has seen its own overhaul and is far more streamlined; to use Stardock's term, it's now more of a ‘tech forest.' Whatever the name, it's now much easier to see the tech forest for the trees, and it's one more glowing improvement that makes Dark Avatar a must-have addition to the original.

Other changes include the addition of optional Super Abilities for each race to help them feel even more unique. For example, one of the cooler abilities is called ‘Super Diplomacy' which aids the Terran race in their diplomatic efforts. These abilities are all fairly well-balanced, though the military abilities seem to be a bit more useful in general. In older turn-based civilization-style strategy games of yore, there were incredible random events that could, and frequently would, change the nature of an entire game. Dark Avatar offers these as well, and they're entitled "Mega-Events." They're not guaranteed to be entirely balanced, but they're definitely intended to upset the pre-existing order of things and make life interesting. Right now there seems to be some concern among fans of the game over the Pirate Infestation event, especially if it hits earlier in the game, as the pirates arrive with some pretty tough starships, but I imagine this will be addressed in a patch. Plus you always have the option to turn off Mega-Events, so it's not that big of a deal.

For all of its depth, Dark Avatar is remarkably bug-free, and when you consider the usefulness of Stardock Central - Stardock's online content-delivery system which automatically downloads and applies needed patches - any bugs that might arise are sure to be quashed quickly and easily for the gamer. Perhaps the coolest thing about the Galactic Civilization series is that its developers are never content with their work and are constantly listening to their fans' feedback in order to persistently improve the game and add new content and changes. In the case of this uber-expansion, everything comes together with panache and perfection and delivers a strategy gaming experience that even the neophyte strategy gamer could appreciate and perhaps more importantly, one that hardcore GalCiv 2 fans will absolutely love!

Mar 13, 2007 | 0 comments
Tony DuLac