I devoted 3 hours of my life to this game yesterday – I was home sick; I had already spent 3 hours watching the disappointing ‘There Will Be Blood’ and this game rounded out a worthless day.

To sum this game up in one line – It’s Command & Conquer but with a twist - It’s in space.

The graphics aren’t overly fantastic – everything is 3 dimensional but most of the ships are boxes of some sort and offer very little satisfaction when they blow up.

The controls were fairly easy to grasp, it took less than an hour of wrangling with them before I figured out how to issue commands, form fleets, control the camera and manage resources. The research portion of the game is exactly like a RTS, spend x amount of cash/resources and research this tech which then unlocks this unit/power up.

I got fairly bored quickly with the game though because it never gave me time to build a fleet properly. I kept being assaulted by larger and larger fleets of pirates. Never mind that there were other races to fight – the pirates seem to be the super powers of the galaxy being able to assemble 30 ship fleets faster than I could assemble 5 ship fleets. The lunacy of pirates not allowing me to actually fight the other races because they possessed more powerful and numerous ships; quickly disenchanted me with whatever little joy I got out of the game.

Overall I’m a big fan of RTS’s but I like my games to have some degree of strategy to them and some realism. I won’t be playing this again – don’t buy it unless you liked what you heard.