Galactic Civilizations II (Gold Edition) (PC Games, 2007)

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Gamespot.com rates the Dread Lords a 9.0/10 Editors Choice
http://www.gamespot.com/p​c/strategy/galacticcivilizatio​ns2/index.html?tag=result;titl​e;3

and Dark Avatar a 9.1/10 Editors Choice
http://www.gamespot.com/p​c/strategy/galacticcivilizatio​ns2darkavatar/index.html?tag=r​esult;title;0

IGN.co rates Dread Lords a 8.7/10
http://pc.ign.com/article​s/694/694441p1.html

and Dark Avatar a 9.0/10
http://pc.ign.com/article​s/763/763792p1.html

When I stumbled across Gal Civ 2 I was immediately reminded of an old favorite, Masters of Orion 2. The two games are very similar. One big improvement Gal Civ 2 has over MoO 2 was a single player campaign mode. This was a big draw for me, but it turned into a big let down once I started playing. The problem is with the technology tree.

In the campaign mode even the early stages require hours of time spent developing your technology for very simple tasks (ex. In order to eliminate an enemy race you'll need to take their planets, but you can't do it until you've researched the ability to invade other planets). It's a nice concept that you need to know how to do this in order to attack, but it's very annoying to need it to complete even the early stages of the campaign.

The next issue issue with the tech tree is that when you beat a stage in the campaign mode and move on to the next one, the tech tree goes back to the default for starting that stage. It wouldn't be so annoying if it wasn't such a big leap. It takes me an hour to get researched to the point of being able to make useful things, but I have to start over with every stage.

I didn't make it far in the campaign because I lost paitence with having to start over repeatedly.

Other problems I ran into with Gal Civ 2 were technical. I had a horrible time trying to install the game. I'm running Windows Vista with 2 video cards (which should be in SLI mode, but are not at the moment due to a motherboard issue). I received the game, inserted the disc and it did nothing. I went to My Computer and found tried to run the launcher for the game manually and it still did nothing. I eventually managed to install the game by running the setup.exe file manually. This problem came up again after the game was installed because I was unable to get to the launcher to launch the game. I thought that updating the game may help the technical issues, but downloading the latest patch didn't resolve any of the issues I was experiencing. To be able to launch this game I had to track down the folder it was installed in and create a shortcut directly to the .exe file that runs the game because the launcher simply would not work.

Another technical issue I experienced was trying to run the game with dual screens. I just got a new 46" TV and thought this game would look nice on it. Unfortunately the game simply would not run on the screen. I had no issues with other games on that screen, but this one would just flicker a few times and go to a black screen. ANNOYING!

Techincal issues aside, this is a decent game. If you're paitent enough to play through the campaign mode the storyline seems to be interesting. There are several different difficulty levels, on the easiest levels your ally's pretty much take care of everything for you, so you don't have to do much if you don't want to be challanged.

If you avoid the campaign and go straight for a free for all match the game plays very similar to MoO 2. There are more options for victory (tecnological victory, cultural victory, etc.) which means it's not all about wiping out the other races if you want to go another route. If you liked MoO 2, you'll probably like Gal Civ 2 if you can get it running.

The product arrived in media mail after a few weeks. However, the package was opened when arrived. Maybe due to bad weather, the envelope was open and the box was wet. But the games and manual was fine and in good conditions. Will buy again with seller.