Lord of Rigel

Overall, I am going to give this game a narrowed recommend even though there are some stability and memory leak issues that would definitely frustrate people with lower end systems. The heritage back to MOO2 is good with more of a Babylon 5 twist to the Elder races than how the Elder races are laid out in the MOO2 ethos. The classic MOO2 like gameplay with modern graphics and some new technologies is welcome for those who were not happy or satisfied with the more modern MOO remake. I would like the combat system to be a little easier to use than the current design. In addition, this game has been out since 2024, so I wonder why they haven't fixed most if not all the memory leak and performance issues in the game. Instead, they just try to warn you when setting up a game with a larger galaxy that there could be problems. I think if you have a system with 32GB memory or more, you can still ride out the memory issues for a long duration. I'm familiar with this with games like Stellaris so instead of just whining about it forever, I just upgraded my PC to have more memory (thankfully before the AI craze). I still think the developers should go back and take a serious effort …

Space 4x games need something unique or special to distance themselves from MOO 1/2. Lord of Rigel does that in mixing in a little Babylon 5 with the two elder races preaching chaos vs order as they try to get the younger races (aka you) to join them in their eternal war. I've enjoyed my time with the game so far. It's got all the basics of a MOO-style space 4X. If you have experience with that type of game you can jump right in. It doesn't have the dazzling visuals of Stellaris or Endless Space 2, but the art is functional. After my first couple of hours I was building an empire, running into AI empires to make peace with/war with. Always expanding. I started to feel that "just one more turn" itch. I would be ready to log off only to think "oh wait, only 2 more turns until that cruiser finishing building so I can move it to the front" followed by "oh wait, only 3 more turns until that new engine tech is done for me to redesign my ships" and so on. When a 4X game gets me putting off turning it off until just that one more thing I know they've hit on a classic formula.

This game is comically bad. I had, in the past, installed the demo, but very quickly figured out that the demo only offers options that I hate to play. So I always uninstalled it without even playing. Now it was on sale for 3 bucks, so I thought I would give it a try. While still in the start screen I noticed that it performs extremely badly when I task switch. Sometimes it stops responding at all and needs to be killed in task manager. Sometimes (most of the time) it needs a minute (to reload?) between switching back to the game and becoming responsive again. I thought I would try windowed mode to maybe solve these problems. It doesn't offer 1920x1080, so I picked 1600x900. Now when the mouse cursor leaves/reenters the game screen it needs that minute to reload. Every time. And when it is actually running it runs at 1fps. I can't even get through the intro video now. So yeah... 3 bucks and it still was too much.

After about 150 hours of play I must say i have enjoyed this much more than I ever enjoyed Moo2.

The game is great. It is a lot like Master of Orion. I give two thumbs up.

Great game so far ! And updates are still improving the experience.