Polaris Sector

Wish I woulda refunded but this a game from my backlog. Oh well thats always been gaming in a nutshell random chance on finding a good game. See I can't even give this a chance because it's a Broken game under windows 11 +NVIDIA, can't full screen without LOSSLESS SCALING, as borderless crashes the game as does fullscreen and normal window mode is clipping the task bar and you can't move the windows taskbar away, tried switching to opengl but that crashes the game too. Also once in game Camera Issues with the mouse, all sorts of bad feelings with it when rotating the view or moving the viewpoint making the game a nightmare to play, it's just not playable in this state. It probably worked on older hardware or IGP's, but I'm not willing to try another machine I spent an hour trying to get it to work right and nothing helped. Beware.

I can't recommend the game right now, because the text spills outside of the boxes on my monitor, which in effect means I can't get the information I need to play. I will come back to change my review if this problem is fixed. I suspect this is a great game, but unless I can play, I certainly won't know. I know it says I played 4 hours. I have not. My wife had some honeydos for me, so I left the game and did those.

Very unique take on space strategy, even the ship creation is very entertaining.

This is an extremely underrated 4x title. I think many players went into this expecting a traditional 4x with a fairly even balance across all the x's but IMO this game is firmly in the camp of War Games. All the crunchy bits are saved for ship design and strategic decision making around use of spys, fleets/armies, and space lanes during war time. The research system is excellent and, after playing quite a bit of Terra Invicta, I suspect provided the inspiration for that game as well. It's split into basic and applied with a slider to set the priority in one direction or another. You also need to discover certain tech before it will be available which I like. Makes it feel like I'm exploring the universe and learning from ancient fallen civilizations...or maybe just my enemy. Graphics aren't amazing but they're clean and certainly do the job better than 90% of war games. Swarms of fighters duck into range to blow something up before retreating to the main battle line, large ships need to turn to aim their big guns which can be taken advantage of, and it all plays out in real time so you can issue tactical commands. Feels very satisfying once you start using balanced fleet design…

This game has some of the most intense "Just one more turn" hypnotism I've ever encountered. That being said it has major issues Whoever allowed a full decade to pass without the ability to select multiple fleets and merge them, or even tell them to go to the same system, will not see the pearly gates. More pressingly, combat is tedious. Units are clunky, both in movement and in size, even my longest ranged weapons can't actually reach beyond - max - a two ship deep line. Which makes trying to bring superior numbers to bare an excercise in frustration, and superior numbers are kind of the only deciding factor of a fight. Maybe I'm dogwater at ship design, but no designs I made mattered compared to simply having more mass in the fight compared to the enemy. This is exascerbated by auto resolve trying to forcefully paint the back of your throat white at every possible opportunity. It will tell you that you have an overwhleming advantage, you press auto resolve, your entire fleet disappears, and they don't lose a single fighter. You play the fight, press "do what you want" and proceed to not lose a single ship. You press auto resolve, win, but it randomly decides that all your uti…

♥♥♥♥ torpedoes and ♥♥♥♥ fighters even more.