Interstellar Conquest is, well, Master of Orion but from AliExpress. It's a really bare bones sci-fi themed galactic empire building 4X strategy game, but it's clunky, unpolished and really un-fun to play. There's no tutorial for the game, which is a problem, but luckily the game is so dumbed down compared to other 4X games you can work out how to play pretty quickly. At which point in time you'll wish you hadn't. There's no science tree, you can just build as many of the three different kinds of buildings on each colony as you have slots. There's no colonisation or pop management, just move a fighter over a planet and spend a turn capturing it and it's pumping out the single game currency for you. This is so shallow and pointless, it's not worth bothering with. I never even thought a 4X game could be shallow, but they managed to do it, the maniacs, they blew it all to hell. Sorry, wrong movie.
One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience.
The game doesn't have any save game features, despite that being a basic standard for all games of this time. The developer might defend this as an attempt to make the game seem more "difficult" without them having to balance the game or do their job properly with engaging and challenging level design, but it's just as likely they simply couldn't work out how to make a save game feature work. Either way, that's a defect that adds another reason for gamers to avoid this game.
On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers.
The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.
While not necessarily a deal breaker, the game does lack polish and a few elements are a little clunky/unsmooth, this is still rough around the edges. There's also some reports of bugs which may result in a negative user experience. Your mileage may vary on this.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.
So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?
Interstellar Conquest has the preposterous price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.
For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Cities: Skylines", "Stellaris" or "Monster Hunter World". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.
[quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b]
Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]
