Stellar Monarch 2 Reviews

An excellent game that runs out of itself a little too early. It is, broadly speaking, what it claims to be; you don't manage planets, you don't control the fleets, you don't assign anything. You just claim the planets and watch your High Command scramble to do your bidding. You don't talk to the other alien races, you have your diplomats for that, they merely come to you to ratify treaties (which are always benefitial to you). You don't construct individual buildings; instead, you invest in processing, or expand your Ministries while they take care of things according to their ability. So then, what do you [i]actually[/i] do? I'm tempted to say "nothing" as a snide comment about how such absurdly powerful leadership positions are completely superficial in the face of the actual work the people on the ground do, but... I'll instead say "point fingers and suck up to nobles". Well, there's more to do. You can divide up the budget. Expand facilities. Manage ship blueprints and decide on squadron composition (it's actually the most micromanagey thing in the game). Pass laws, pass reforms. I guess you need to convince nobles to support them first, but that's a trivial matter. But perhaps that's the point. Just watching your empire expand by your royal decree while you do nothing, since you already claimed all those planets anyway, is actually kinda satisfying. Oh, and before you say "lol just watch water spread after being spilled on the floor", know that all the battles in this game are quite deeply simulated. There's a LOT under the hood, and you'll only stumble upon it if you dig; for example, reading the detailed flow of the battle in the battle simulator or looking at your fleet crews' skill levels. I'd almost call this overengineered. All this complexity which the player almost never sees. This would be good if other parts of the game were more engaging. But after some 10 hours of play I noticed that there's nothing new happening, just old events cycling over and over. Occasionally a new galactic threat appears, but... so what? Minor losses, in the grand scale of things. You don't even need to do anything, the High Command will retake everything for you, "as instructed by the royal order". Wait, minor losses? The genocides that happen in this game make the goddamn Holocaust look like a statistical error. "Oh, there's 400 mln of Terrans per planet in this area? Well, we can't retake it right now. Guess they'll die lol". And of course, same thing happens to the alien races. 200 mln cyberians on this planet? Nuke em. Invade. Purge the Xenos. Exterminatus. The Emperor Protects. Wait, I'm the Emperor. Do I protect? Eh, too busy throwing a banquet to convince Lord Fluffybutt to support my fiscal reforms. Note that you don't get a choice in this. Xenos are Xenos. You don't talk to Xenos, your diplomats don't do anything with them. Your only option is total war. You can ignore some of them, but the only meaningful way of interacting with them is eradication and repossession of their planets. Or, perhaps, using them as a buffer against a more aggressive Xeno race. I actually kind of like this. The game is very openly satirical about how messed up the Empire is, like Helldivers 2. For example, "We don't look down on the inferior races" is such a sentence. Or "Ripping off gullible aliens is moral, because we protect unfortunate Terrans from losing their savings". And it's not just the ruling class: if you declare that aliens are equal to you, it fuels dissent! Makes rebels stronger! "This beta cuck Emperor just said that [strike]America[/strike] [strike]Super Earth[/strike] the Empire isn't the greatest! SCANDALOUS!". Amazing. And that's what makes this so unfortunate. If there were more events, maybe some kind of storyline, more things to do with the court, more interactions, more focus on what the game wants you to focus on, it'd be [i]insanely[/i] good. So you might wonder, why the negative review? Let's say you go to a movie theater and watch the new Sonichu the Edgehog: Robotnik's Snupingas. You're having fun, Robotnik is saying the famous line "Snooping as usual I see", you laugh; and then, roughly 80 minutes in, as the protagonists are collecting the Sonichu Balls you get from your seat and leave. Afterwards, your friends ask you, "so what did you think of the movie?" "Awesome! Oh, I loved the PINGAS moment! It was so funny!" "But you left in the middle?" "Yes, because I was bored during the Sonichu Balls part." "But you said you liked the movie?" I hold this apparently exotic opinion that if the game doesn't manage to hold your engagement through most of its length, it's not a very good game. Either its pacing or fun factors are way off. And in this case, I just think the game runs out of stuff to do far too early. There's a DLC coming up which is supposed to spice the internal intrigue up a bit. I might check it out, maybe it will fill this unfortunate hole that's preventing me from truly enjoying Stellar Monarch 2. Still: I think the game's definitely on to something. I applaud the effort, and if there ever is a sequel, I'll be sure to grab it as well. So it's less of a "yes" or "no". It's "almost". Unfortunately, in absolute terms, "almost" is ultimately a "no". Thanks for reading. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42922988/]this beta cuck reviewer said that (insert popular game) isn't the greatest[/url]