very good

While you can feel its age it is still fundamentally the good strategic experience its sequel has become known for.

After sinking well over 40 hours into Endless Space, I can say it's a genuinely satisfying 4X experience once you get past the initial learning curve — the faction variety alone kept me coming back, especially my time with the Horatio clones, which is as wonderfully absurd as it sounds. The music and atmosphere are top-notch, and the tech tree offers that classic 'one more turn' pull that good strategy games live or die by. That said, the combat system is essentially a glorified cutscene where you play rock-paper-scissors with battle cards and hope for the best, which gets old fast — I started skipping battles almost immediately. The AI diplomacy is baffling: factions will offer you peace one turn and declare war five turns later for no apparent reason, and the late game drags as you endlessly click through turns waiting for fleets to crawl across the map. It's a dated game that shows its age, but for the price — especially since it's apparently free on the developer's website — it's worth experiencing if you have any love for classic space 4X.