Legendary designer Sid Meier presents the next evolution in strategy games, with the most addictive, compelling gameplay yet. Explore the alien planet that is your new home and uncover its myriad mysteries. Discover over 75 extraordinary technologies. Build over 60 base upgrades and large scales secret projects for your empire. Conquer your enemies with a war machine that you design from over 32,000 possible unit types.

DESIGN YOUR OWN WAR MACHINE
Custom build fighting units that meet your mission's specific needs, or accept your governor's recommendations.

TERRAFORM AN ALIEN LANDSCAPE
Raise mountains and level hillsides to make the planet more habitable for yourself or harsher for your opponents.

DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS
Dynamic personalities react individually to your actions. Your diplomatic decisions dictate your path to one of five ultimate resolutions.

INFINITELY REPLAYABLE
A random 3D world generator, unlimited strategies, five paths to victory, six levels of difficulty, seven unique factions, fully featured map/game editor, and a whole host of customizable options ensure unlimited gameplay.

BENCHMARK AUTOMATION
Intelligent city governors, global commands and an in-game tutorial assist you in building and managing your empire.

UNPRECEDENTED MULTIPLAYER
Unite or fight with your friends via the Internet, a LAN, modem, or serial link.

AT HOME OR ON THE GO
Unique installation options and scaleable technology optimize performance for all machines, form laptops and low end Pentiums to the latest top-shelf hardware.

Review
The first thing that I saw that told me that this was going to be a great game done right was that right after installing the game I figured I better give the manual a read.  The first thing it  told me to do was to put the manual down and go play the tutorials instead. Talk about faith in their product, how many games do you know that has a tutorial that will replace the manual ? Well off I went to the tutorials to see if they could provide this level of quality that they offered. I was not to be disappointed. I highly recommend that you DO NOT READ the manual but jump right in and play the tutorials to learn the facets of game play. There is no better way to learn how to play than to actually get right into it.

There are a large number of variables that you can set to play this game with and they are as follows: Ocean coverage, erosive forces native life forms , cloud cover size of the planet and the level of  difficulty of the game. I found that you need to play the standard size planet to have any room to maneuver but then this game lasted well over 30 hours too :-). Each faction that there is in the game ( and there is 7 of them to choose from ) has it's own special abilities and traits to make them different to play. They have their own goals and set of standards as well.

Getting back to the tutorials for a second. I found them infinitely helpful in learning how to get started and to progress thru the game as well. However I also read the manual to learn about my enemies and to the traits and benefits of each faction. The ingame tutorials that popped up with suggestions as to what to do at a particular time are helpful but some may wish to turn off this particular item.

Conclusion
Sid Meirs is one of the, what I would call, founding fathers of the gaming industry. He is a beacon of quality in this time of unmentionable clones of the great games and he has once again risen above the clamor of the me too games to provide us with one of the soon to be all time classics of true gaming . This game has absolutely no faults that I could find. Everything has been done to ensure that we the end user will have a truly memorable experience with no bugs to play through.This game deserves the highest score I have ever given a game. I love to play strategy games and this one is now my personal game of choice in that genre.This game has everything. From making deals with your fellow players to using mind control to take over enemy units and alien beings ( mind worms) This is the ultimate in strategy games.Nothing I have seen can compare to this game in scope and playability.

Score: 98%

Reviewed by: Mark "True"   Hetherington