It’s your job to keep the people happy and minimise civil unrest, so you have to adapt accordingly. These policies may work for a spell but your population, once discovering that there are ways of coexisting with other species, may demand a more xenophilic government. For example, you could begin a game as part of a fanatical, militant dictatorship. Push through that steep learning curve, and you’re rewarded with a game with near limitless possibilities and pathways, on which you are never truly stuck. This does give the game a bit of a ‘Marmite’ aesthetic (love it or hate it!), though personally, I find that to be part of its charm. While you do have a friendly AI assistant guiding you in your first hours of building your empire, Stellaris is wonderfully unashamed in its assertion that this is a serious game for serious star-empire builders. Default settings will populate the galaxy with eight other species to encounter - though that is not including potential space-dwelling monsters, fallen empires, pirates and pre-hyperspace civilisations that you may encounter. A medium-sized map will yield a massive 400 systems to explore (a large map will increase it to 600), filled with as many (or as few) other empires as you so wish. This can make Stellaris rather intimidating when you begin to play it. Ultimately, I realised, who cares? Games are games, and being able to play them on any medium is a rare joy - especially when Paradox has come along and done a beautiful job bringing the grand strategy game, Stellaris, from PC to both the Xbox One and PS4.

So I wasn’t going completely off course with my thoughts.Ĭlearly, I had a lot things to get off my chest. Oh, also I wrote a little bit about PC vs console, because y’know, this review is about a console port. I even considered waxing lyrical about how it felt increasingly like the gaming world was being dumbed down and whether it would it ever be the same when we have greedy corporations running the show and choking release-day content. I had this grand speech all typed up about how PC gaming took a fraction of the coordinated skill of console gaming, how modern gaming focused too much on FPS and not the vast world building strategies of yesteryear. There have been no fewer than six iterations of this introduction.

This has honestly been the hardest opening paragraph to compose since I started writing for Jump Dash Roll.

How to play stellaris 2019