Armada 2526 Gold Edition

Don't let the hours fool you. I had to use compatibility shortcut so playtime doesn't reflect. It's probably hundreds of hours, including playing from years ago back in the day. This 4X game is a bit of an acquired taste. At glance, it looks "MOO2"-like but doesn't "feel" like that or other 4X conquer-the-galaxy games. It looks/feels clunky at times, like sort of mish-mashed together, like it was put through heck just to get it to work. Overall, the game has serious fun to be had, and with serious flaws that requiring sucking it up to accept. For starters, most of the screenshots show all sorts of "3D" ships, stations, ground forces battling. It's not even like that or that type of game. This is no Sins of a Solar Empire or Sword of the Stars, not even close! Rather, this is much closer the type of 4X like MOO2 (Master of Orion 2, for the uninitiated), Interstellar Genesis, or Stars in Shadow are. You'll spend 95% of the gameplay on the 2D map of space. I think there is only 1 screenshot that really shows that. Now while you have the traditional 4X galactic map, you don't see your "ships" on them. Rather, you see a side-ways "Dorito" type icon that represents you have a ship or …

Armada 2526 Gold Edition is an ancient game from 2009. It's a whopping 15 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for any modern gaming display resolutions (or widescreen monitors), hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. This was a B grade ripoff of Master of Orion, intended to fill the very large deficit of galactic empire building 4X strategy games while everyone waited for Stellaris to show up. And there's some fantastic ideas here with deep and interesting mechanics for fleet building, planetary management and so on. The problem is that these great ideas weren't matched with great execution. The diplomacy in the game is an incomprehensible joke (then again, we've all been nuked by Ghandi out of the blue when playing Civ, haven't we?) The UX is clunky and dated, it's awkward and generally un-fun to play, but the real killer here is just how badly optimised the game is. It's also incredibly buggy, with unhandled…

one of the best 4x strategy games ive ever played

what a pile of ♥♥♥♥. The Tutorial doesnt work. Did the idiot devs bother to test the game first

It's old but it's alright.

Gameplay is clunky and extremely unbalanced. 10/10