Space. The Final Frontier. In a Galaxy Far, Far Away. Where in the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, the Spice must Flow. You get the idea. Science fiction is a staple of modern entertainment, because there's something fun about speculating how a spacefaring society with technology so advanced it might as well be magic would function, with or without alien life forms. But have you ever thought to yourself, "Gee, I sure would love a needlessly complex strategy game about creating my own sci fi civilization and exploring the cosmos while reenacting my favorite sci fi stories!" Well do I have the game for you.
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Enter Stellaris. Released in 2016, this sci-fi strategy game was developed and published by Paradox Interactive, with the console port being made by Tantalus Media. This is one of the many Grand Strategy games that Paradox specializes in, though the concept of this game is in my opinion an easier sell. Most of Paradox's games are historical fiction, taking place in alternate versions of the distant past. Crusader Kings, for example, is set in Medieval Times, while Hearts of Iron takes place during the World Wars. Stellaris is the odd duck out, taking place in a completely fictional time period, starting roughly 200 years into the future. As such, there's a lot more room for creativity, at least in theory, since you are not bound by historical accuracy. Instead, the goal of Stellaris was to be a love letter to all things science fiction and as such, there are plenty of references to other sci-fi stories sprinkled in all throughout the game.
To be a man in a 2200+ year old society is to live among untold trillions. It is a time to seek out new civilizations and boldly go where no one has gone before. But most importantly, it's the perfect setup for a space opera. And that's basically the entire story of Stellaris. Well, sort of. A big part of this game's appeal is that it features an Emergent Narrative. What that means is that after creating your own civilization (which I will call Empires for the sake of brevity) the story is dictated almost entirely by randomized events and how you choose to deal with them. As well as how you choose to deal with any over Empire that you encounter on your travels. It's a very free-form approach to storytelling, and the result is that it's rare for two or more playthroughs to play out the same way. Though there are a few standard beats. Every civilization starts off isolated and alone in the galaxy, slowly expanding until they contact alien life. Intergalactic superpowers fight, trade and form alliances as the number of unclaimed star systems begins to dwindle and borders begin to take shape. And all civilizations have to deal with a universal threat towards the end that puts the whole galaxy in danger. What happens in between these points is more or less randomized.
But where do you begin with this game? You start at Empire Creation. While you can play as about 20 or so premade Empires, the real core of this game comes from designing your own aliens. Or your own version of Humanity's Future, if you like that sort of thing. And I am letting you know now that this game is DENSE. Paradox games are infamous for their steep learning curves and numerous complexities. And Stellaris is no different. While the tutorial that starts once the campaign begins does help with teaching the player the bare minimum, this is a game that will take more than a little while to get used to. Especially if you prefer more fast-paced, action focused games. This doesn't make Stellaris a bad game, not in the slightest. But its gameplay is meant for a very specific audience, the kind that enjoys solving problems with brains rather than brawn. And the kind of audience that doesn't mind looking up guides on the Internet just to make sense of the convoluted information this game can sometimes throw at you. While I do like games that require you to think and plan ahead like Fire Emblem and X-COM, nothing I have played or reviewed here before has quite as many moving parts as Stellaris. And from what I hear, the rest of Paradox's catalogue boasts a similar level of complexity.
Okay, let's breakdown Empire Creation, since all the important choices start here. Your Empire can be customized in a multitude of ways. Most of it is cosmetic stuff like picking an animated portrait that will represent your aliens/future-humans in some menu screens, or what biome your home planet is, or even designing your own flag. But there are mechanical decisions to be made here, like choosing Authorities and Origins. Authorities are the type of government your civilization uses, whether that be an Imperial Dynasty where the role of leadership is passed down from parent to child in a single family across the generations, or a Democracy where the the leaders are chosen by popularity votes at regular intervals. Origins are basically your Empire's backstory, giving you some nice lore and roleplay potential while also simultaneously changing how the game starts. Some Origins offer really strong bonuses, others exist to add an extra challenge to the campaign to push your management and strategy skills to their limits. For example, the Mechanist Origin allows your Empire to start the game with eight fully operational robots as well as a factory to build even more. The Doomsday Origin will make your home planet explode after 35 (in-game) years, so you have to find a new planet for your people to live on before then or risk your species going completely extinct. But most importantly, there's an option to write/type out a custom biography. This has no effect on gameplay but as an aspiring writer, being able to write custom biographies for fictional civilizations is something that makes me very, very happy.
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But the three most important things to worry about are Traits, Ethics, and Civics. Traits are biological strengths and weaknesses your aliens/future-humans have that make them better or worse at certain tasks. Things like enhanced upper body strength, fast learning minds that can invent new tech sooner than everyone else, or extended lifespans to live longer. However, not all Traits are beneficial. Some might make your citizens have a hard time reproducing, others might make them prone to riots. So I know what you're thinking. "Why would I ever pick Negative Traits!?" Well, you see, every Trait is assigned a point value. Positive Traits cost points while Negative Traits give more points to work with. The idea is that you're supposed to pick one or two weaknesses that you think you can live with so you have enough points to unlock the Positive Traits that you actually want. If you are smart about it, you can turn your weaknesses into a net positive.
Ethics are the next main decision and this will greatly determine the "vibe" of your Empire. Ethics are the moral and societal values that your Empire respects and practices. Ethics come in two variants, Moderate and Fanatic. Much like Traits, they will grant bonuses like increased fire rate for weapons or being able to hire extra diplomats, but they also come with downsides like restricting who or what you can wage war with or restricting your ability to build robots. Normally, you can pick any three Ethics of your choosing so long as they do not contradict each other. For example, your Empire can be Militaristic, Spiritual, and Egalitarian because those Ethics do not contradict each other. But your Empire cannot be both Militaristic and Pacifistic since those two Ethics are opposite to each other. Fanatic Ethics are even stronger than their Moderate counterparts, but you can only pick one Fanatic Ethic and one Moderate Ethic at a time. Fanatic Ethics are basically exaggerated versions of their Moderate counterparts, with everything that Ethic represents being cranked up to eleven. For example, a moderately Pacifist Empire will only fight in war to overthrow tyrannical regimes and replace them with something more humane and ethical. A Fanatically Pacifist Empire won't fight in wars at all. The other Fanatic Ethics follow this pattern of being a more exaggerated version of the Moderate counterpart. But again, the benefits of being Fanatic makes the Empire far stronger at whatever they are Fanatic about. Fanatic Militarist Empires have a whopping 30% fire rate upgrade compared to the Moderate version's 10% as an example. Basically, by making a Fanatic Empire, you are sacrificing the versatility of a third Ethic in exchange for greater specialization. Both are valid ways to play. But I do prefer making Fanatic Empires, but that's because I like seeing big numbers get even bigger.
Finally, Civics. Civics are more specialized bonuses that become available based on which Ethics you chose. These also help form the "vibe" of your Empire. While there are some Civics are available to all Empire types, all of the fun Civics are locked behind certain Ethic combos. For example, the Citizen Service Civic requires your Empire to be both Militaristic and Egalitarian, and it allows you to (potentially) build up a bigger navy than everyone else. The Inward Perfection Civic meanwhile requires you to be both Xenophobic and Pacifistic, and it basically cuts you off from the rest of the galaxy while GREATLY boosting the growth of your Empire's economy and population. The other Civics have similar restrictions and similar benefits. You can pick any combination of two Civics that you want as long as you meet the requirements for both. And finally, you can mix and match Traits, Ethics, and Civics for some very powerful or very wacky combos. Like a democratic society of future-human monks with the Inward Perfection and Agrarian Idle Civics, who are so obsessed with preserving the environment that they developed Traits like Communal and Conservationist that allow them to use even less resources for their day-to-day lives. Or a society of hyper-intelligent but physically weak Fanatically Materialist space rats who use the Technocracy and Meritocratic Civics to not only build robots to do all the hard work for them, but structure their entire society around science and knowledge. Or a group of strong and industrial but unruly and stubborn space dragons who are so Fanatically Militarist they took the Citizen Service Civic and Distinguished Admiralty Civic specifically to make the most dangerous navy the galaxy has ever seen. These three are but a taste of the kind of spacefaring civilization that you can make once you learn how everything works.
Okay, so you got your Empire ready and raring to go. Now we can get to the actual gameplay. Stellaris is a fairly hands-off game. You interact with your Empire mostly through a variety of menus. Because unlike every other game, you are controlling AN ENTIRE CIVILIZATION, not just one character. Because of that, you see everything happen at the macro scale. Time is measured in days, months, and years while mere minutes pass in real life. You spend a good chunk of your time just checking an intergalactic map and watching out for meaningful changes like expanding borders or reports of hostile activity. You can zoom in to individual star systems to see your ships and planets in more detail, but you can't get any closer to the action than that. You can give orders to your fleets and ships, and order construction of various facilities on any planets you own. Planets are quite possibly the most valuable resource in the game. Without a planet to build on, you have nothing to work with. The main challenge of Stellaris revolves are the classic Four Ex's of Paradox games. Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate. If you are not doing any of those four things you are, to be blunt, playing the game wrong. You must send out Science Ships to Explore uncharted star systems and survey desirable planets before building on them. You must use your resources to Expand your reach and grow your power. You must Exploit any natural resources you find so you can continue Exploring and Expanding. And if anything gets in your way, you must Exterminate the threat before it can cause any lasting damage to your Empire. All Paradox games, regardless of setting or time period, live and die by the Four Ex's.
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But rival Empires are not the only dangers in the galaxy. So let's talk about the Crisis Events. Crisis Events are special events that only happen once the campaign reaches certain years. You can change which years it happens in the options menu, but once a campaign starts, the Crisis Years are locked in and cannot be changed unless you start a new campaign from scratch. Anyway, when a Crisis Event occurs, a violently hostile alien will appear somewhere in the galaxy and attack all Empires indiscriminately. What kind of alien is random by default, though again, you can pick something specific from the options menu. These range from space pirate clans banding together to tear down galactic society at large, to living bioweapons that devour all who stand in their path, to a classic Terminator style AI uprising. Crisis Events are incredibly strong, and they exist as a "stress test" for your Empire. If your Empire can survive the Crisis Events, your Empire can survive anything. In fact, there's an entire difficulty slider that exists for no reason than to increase or decrease the power of the Crisis Events. At max strength, Crisis Events can become over 25 times more powerful than normal. If you wish to defeat a 25x Crisis Event, you need nothing short of a perfectly optimized Empire and a foolproof plan that you spent the whole campaign carefully laying out. Anything less will result in failure. Of course, you could turn the Crisis strength down to give your less-than-perfect Empire a fighting chance.
There are also Fallen Empires. Fallen Empires are special Empires that start the game in control of a small area in the galaxy, usually about only five or six star systems. But they also start the campaign with a comically overpowered navy that will curb stomp anyone who angers the Fallen. The Fallen themselves are all themed around the main Ethics. Unlike Crisis Events, who only appear later on in a campaign, the Fallen are present from day one. The only reason the Fallen don't immediately wipe out the other Empires is because they literally cannot expand their borders outside their starting zone. Nor can they replace any casualties should they encounter the rare opponent that can wound them. At least, not until the Fallen Awaken. When a Fallen Empire Awakens, they will start rapidly expanding their borders in all directions and reinforcing their already fearsome fleets. Depending on their Ethics, the Awakened will either give a chance to join them as a vassal state willingly or wipe your Empire off the star charts. The good news is that a Fallen Empire can only Awaken in very rare circumstances. Like if a Crisis Event happens and the Fallen haven't Awakened already, they will Awaken to go fight the Crisis. If there are multiple Fallen Empires in the same galaxy with opposing Ethics, a special event called the War In Heaven will occur where both Empires Awaken at the same time and all the "normal" Empires have to either pick a side in the War or risk getting caught in the cross fire. While it is possible to fight off both sides of the War In Heaven as a neutral party, it is a difficult undertaking, perhaps even more so than fending off a Crisis Event. Again, good planning and optimization is required to survive the War In Heaven.
But how does one defeat such powerful foes? Well you need a strong navy. While ground battles exist in Stellaris, they don't happen anywhere nearly as often as space battles do. And to be honest, the ground battles are probably the weakest part of the game, since it's a fairly barebones system (at the time of writing) that can be easily avoided. And going back to the Four Ex's, you use the resources you Exploited to build warships so you can Exterminate your enemies so you can continue to Explore and Expand in peace. At the start of the campaign the only combat-capable ship type you can build is the humble Corvette. All ships can be outfitted with various weapons such as plasma cannons, railguns, flamethrowers and even deployable drone fighters. But you have to invent that technology before you can use it, so initially your Empire's Corvettes are all armed with nothing more than dinky little lasers. You invent new tech by having a named Scientist lead a research project, with the research options being randomized (noticing a trend?). Research progresses automatically unless the Scientist leading the research project dies, in which case you need to hire a new Scientist to continue the research.
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Once research is finished, your Empire can now use the newly invented tech to give your warships a much needed power boost, and that Scientist can be given a new project to work on in the meantime. While all the different weapons provide unique strategies and fighting styles, generally speaking, you can win most battles by having either bigger guns or more ships than your opponent. This ties in to Fleet Power, a little number that conveniently shows at a glance the combined power of every warship in that fleet. Unless the enemy has built a fleet designed entirely to counter yours, if your Fleet Power is a bigger number you will win the battle. It's probably the simplest thing in this very complicated game. And while it is true that your Fleet Power will gradually lower as your ships take damage and suffer casualties, you can easily repair and replace damaged and destroyed ships so long as you are not in combat. And while it might be tempting to pour all of your resources into your naval fleets the first chance you get, this is actually a bad idea because you have to balance your economy and not drive yourself bankrupt by overinvesting. Instead, you want to build your navy up over time. Like, once every in-game year (roughly equal to ten real life minutes) you can get away with adding three or four ships to your navy. Three or four dozen ships a year is an unrealistic goal, at least with how the in-game economy works.
But you cannot just attack any other Empire without some kind of cause. This is the Casus Belli system. Basically, if you want to go to war with another Empire, you need to give a reason why. The reason also changes the win condition and end result. For example, Liberation Wars are fought to change a rival Empire's Ethics to match the winner's, thus turning them into a potential ally, while Domination Wars are fought to expand the winner's borders by forcibly taking control of the losing Empire's star systems. The only time you don't need a Casus Belli to wage war is if you have a Civic that lets you ignore the whole system like Devouring Swarm or Fanatical Purifiers. Or if the opponent in question is a Crisis Event or the War In Heaven. Or if your opponent has one of the aforementioned Civics that ignore Casus Bellis. But anyway, once the war starts, you are free to invade your enemies' territory and attack their ships and stations. There is a timer system called War Exhaustion that mostly exists so you can't keep the war going forever. Basically, as both you and the rival Empire take casualties, War Exhaustion for both sides builds up. Once it reaches a certain threshold, you can either settle for a truce or claim absolute victory, based on how well you did in the war. The only criticism I have of the War Exhaustion system is that makes evasive, hit-and-run style navies far more powerful than defensive "stand your ground!" style navies. Because War Exhaustion doesn't build up when you or your enemies retreat from battle, only when your ships and stations are completely destroyed.
But speaking of planets and economy, let's talk resources. Resources come in five basic varieties. Food, Minerals, Energy, Alloys and Consumer Goods. Food is self-explanatory. It's the stuff to keep your Empire from starving. Energy is both electricity and money. Everything has a monthly upkeep cost of at least one point of Energy, so you need to keep this somewhat high so you don't go bankrupt. Minerals are raw materials for construction. Minerals can be converted into any other resource, and most early construction projects require a few hundred of them on hand. This is probably the most common resource in the game. Alloys are refined metals, needed to build space ships, space stations and (eventually) robots. This is the rarest and most valuable resource. Consumer Goods are luxury products for civilians. Things like books, movies, video games, sports cars, and cell phones. Things that they technically don't need but provide entertainment. This is probably the least useful resource unless you explicitly plan on playing a merchant style Empire that resolves everything with trade deals as opposed to violence (which is a valid way to play the game). Because Consumer Goods only really exists to keep your citizens happy. And happy citizens won't want to start a rebellion to overthrow you. So even though they aren't as important as the other four, it's still worth investing into Consumer Goods. But no matter what, you need to find a habitable planet to build facilities to produce these resources. Farms for Food, Power Plants for Energy, Mines for Minerals, etc. Once you decide what to build, it is again, automatic. Only this time you don't need to have a named character lead the project. You can hire a Governor to watch over that planet (or several planets at once), and while they might speed up the process, they aren't required. Governors mostly exist to provide boosts for the entire planet so long as they remain in office. These boosts are themed around the Governor's personality. Like a Governor with a strong sense of justice will reduce crime on any planet under his jurisdiction while a Governor with a love for agriculture will increase Food production for any Farms on that planet.
There are also advanced resources like Dark Matter and Exotic Gases that are so volatile that your Empire needs to invent new tech just to be able to collect or produce them in the first place. These advanced resources aren't as essential to your Empire's development, but they do let you build bigger and more dangerous weapons, which makes your warships better combatants, which lets you Exterminate your enemies and so and so forth. You should understand how everything comes back to the Four Ex's by now. Anyway, one last important resource are Pops. Pops is the catch all term for any citizen living in your Empire, although I heard somewhere that one Pop is supposed to represent hundreds of people as one unit, because you know, macro scale space game. Pops are needed to work all the jobs to produce every resource mentioned earlier. Pops also have their own needs. They need Food to not starve, they are paid in Energy, and they indulge in Consumer Goods. They also need Housing to rest at night and Amenities to keep them happy. If their needs are not met they might start a rebellion. Which means setting some resources aside to tend to your people's needs, which is yet another reason why overinvesting in your navy is a bad idea. Because if you pour all of your resources into the navy, you won't have anything left to tend to your people. It's all about finding that economic balance.
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The final two "resources" we need to talk about are Influence and Unity. Which are more like concepts that build up over time than something physical but that's neither here nor there. Influence is a measure of your political sway. You can spend Influence to Expand your borders by claiming to be the legal owner of a star system. You can spend Influence to give your entire Empire temporary power boosts called Edicts (which do things like boost resource production or shorten construction time). And you can spend Influence doing manipulative, politician type shenanigans. But how do you get Influence? Much like in real life, sci-fi civilizations are not one dimensional clichés, at least when written well. There will almost always be smaller political Factions within your Empire who embody the main Ethics. While the first Factions to appear in your Empire will be the ones whose Ethics are already supported, if the campaign goes on long enough you'll have at least one Faction per Ethic. Making the Factions happy by legalizing their desired policies will earn you Influence. Displeasing the Factions by outlawing their desired policies will halt your Influence gain, though to my knowledge they can't take it away forcibly. At least, I've never seen Influence go into the negatives before, and I put well over 100 hours into this game across four different campaigns. But no matter what, as long as you have more satisfied Factions than displeased Factions, you can still get Influence.
Unity represents your Empire's cultural development and how, well, united your people are. This resource builds up automatically at all times, never going down under any circumstances. Once it reaches a threshold, you will be allowed to unlock a Tradition, which are basically the Influence Edicts but substantially stronger and once chosen, a Tradition will work for the entire rest of the campaign. The Traditions are divided into sets of five all built around a theme. Domination, Expansion, Harmony, Diplomacy, Supremacy and Discovery. If you unlock every Tradition in a set you unlock an Ascension. Ascensions are upgrades that are even stronger than Traditions, though you can only have up to eight per campaign. And when I say that Ascensions are strong, I mean they are ABSURD. These include things like becoming so advanced at robotics your Empire's species uploads their souls into robotic shells so they can live forever, meaning your Scientists and Governors will never die again. Or your Empire's leaders declaring themselves to be the Guardians of the Galaxy, thus making all of your Empire's weaponry deal double damage against Crisis Events. But this brings us to my biggest complaint with Stellaris, and it's something that Paradox and Tantalus have acknowledged themselves, so this is a pretty big deal.
There are two words that will strike fear into the hearts of any seasoned Stellaris fan; Xeno Compatibility. This Ascension right here is responsible for a lot of behind the scenes technical difficulties. What Xeno Compatibility does is it allows your Empire's species to become able to mate and reproduce with any other alien species, thus creating hybrid citizens. Which at first glance doesn't sound that bad, especially for the Mass Effect crowd. The problem here is that the game doesn't put a hard "stop" on how far Xeno Compatibility goes, so it can very easily create hybrids of hybrids, and then make hybrids out of those hybrids, ad infinitum. The result is that the game literally cannot keep up with the infinite hybrids being created by a Xeno Compatible Empire, resulting in frame rate drops or even crashes. This got so bad that in a free update, Paradox added a feature to the options menu that straight up disables Xeno Compatibility and prevents it from even showing up in the Ascension list. Honestly, what I would have done, speaking as someone who never made a video game before but knows how challenging the experience can be, is simply make Xeno Compatibility a massive permanent boost to Pop reproduction speed. Like 50% or even 100%. Just have the hybrid stuff be flavor text. I feel like that one change would make Xeno Compatibility actually usable while still allowing for "hybrids" in your Empire.
And now that I got my gripes with Xeno Compatibility out of the way, let's talk DLC. The other thing Paradox games are known is a ludicrous amount of post-launch support. For better and for worse, most of the post-launch support tends to be in the form of paid expansions that cost additional money (between $5 to $20). And again, Stellaris is no different. At the time of writing there are 12 main expansions that radically alter the game by adding new Civics, new Origins, new structures and ship types, new space creature bosses called Leviathans that your navy can fight, and a bunch of other things you would expect from you average space opera. And also a ton of cosmetic DLC adding new portraits to customize the appearance of your aliens. Is the DLC worth buying? Maybe. I'm not in charge of how you spend your money. But me personally, cosmetic DLC doesn't excite me personally, since I would rather have an expansion that completely transforms the experience than a new look that feels the same to play. That being said, the only DLC that I going to tell you to pick up, if you choose to get this game, is Utopia (which allows you to build giant space stations called Megastructures as well as the option to make your Empire's species a Tyranid/Zerg style hive mind) and Leviathans (which adds the aforementioned bosses). Without those two DLC packs, playing Stellaris feels like playing the demo of a game and not the full experience. Keep in mind that the version I played was just the Deluxe Edition, which comes with Utopia, Leviathans and the Plantoids portrait pack for no extra cost. I don't have any of the other expansions.
But trust me, Stellaris with the DLC packs is a completely different beast from the vanilla experience. The Apocalypse pack adds the ability to build the Colossus, which is literally just your Empire's own version of the Death Star from Star Wars. Federations has an overhauled diplomacy system that lets you rule the galaxy with the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation, and allows you do a lot more with peaceful alliances. Nemesis lets you choose to literally Become the Crisis and become a threat to the galaxy so dangerous all of the Empires in the galaxy (including the actual Crisis Events) will team up to stop your evil plans. Synthetic Dawn adds in a metric boat load of content for robot lovers, including the option to make your Empire start as a species of completely mechanical androids. Toxoids is a nice middle ground between a cosmetic pack (adding some poison and pollution themed portraits) while also adding thematically appropriate game content like two new Origins and a ton of toxin-themed Civics and Traits. Megacorps allows you to turn your Empire into what can best be described as Space Amazon and lets you build major businesses on any planet in the galaxy, if it belongs to another Empire entirely. This is both the best and worst thing about Stellaris. The fact that the game is still receiving post-launch support eight years later is impressive. But at the same time, buying absolutely every DLC available is akin to buying a whole new game entirely. So if you are gaming on a budget, only buy the DLC if it has something that you genuinely feel would make the whole game better. I personally consider the portrait packs to be fairly anticlimactic, since most of the changes are mostly cosmetic. The more recent portrait packs have made an effort to include more mechanical changes like new Traits, Origins and Civics, so there's that.
The final gameplay thing that is important to note is that Stellaris does have an optional multiplayer mode, with up to 32 players can each take control of an Empire and meddle in strategies and alliances far more nuanced than what can be done in single-player. In this game mode, real people effectively replace all the NPC Empires. And very generously, only the host of the server needs to own a DLC pack for it to function. As long as the host owns something like Utopia or Federations or Apocalypse or any of the other DLC packs, any other player on that server can access the content those expansions have for free. This is, in a way, the closest thing Stellaris has to a "Try Before you Buy" system. So once again, the power of friendship and Jolly Cooperation can save the day. Or at least, a few dollars from your wallet. I haven't messed with multiplayer that much myself.
In terms of presentation, Stellaris is good for what it's trying to do. This game is, as stated many times, played on a macro scale. You will never get a close look at your cities or citizens. Your named leaders are portrayed by 2D portraits with one or two simple looping animations. But the stars and planets themselves look good. Every time you get a report of a random event, you also get some nice artwork that provides a visual aid, and the artwork is generally pretty good. The different alien portraits are all divided into different taxonomies, like Mammals and Avians. Most of the portraits generally have a good variety to them. There are some portraits that are literally just anthropomorphic animals like foxes or geckos, or humans with a weird thing on their head. But then you have some that look truly alien, like an Avian that looks more like a feathered Christmas tree than an actual bird, or a Fungoid "parasite" that has attached itself to a different alien entirely. Even with just the base game, there's a lot of options for making almost any kind of alien you can imagine. Keep in mind, however, that most of the game is spent looking at the galactic map. And depending on how each Empire turns out in
In terms of sound, again, the game is good for what it's trying to do. The music is good background noise, but I never felt like listening to the music by itself. The sound effects are better, with a set of recognizable beeps and tunes notifying of of anything noteworthy. There is almost no voice acting whatsoever, with the only voiced dialogue coming from the Advisor, a character that teaches you the basics during the tutorial, while also informing you of import events like war declarations or the completion of research projects. The default Advisor voice is basically a stereotypical British butler voice, with a robotic filter on top of it. The other Advisor voices are locked behind the Synthetic Dawn expansion as well as a few portrait packs such as Necroids and Toxoids. All of these voices are based on the main Ethics and Civics, with a few outliers like the Diplomat and Soldier voices not being based anything in particular. A few favorites of mine are the Cyberpunk, the Necroid, the Xenophile and the Technocrat. The Cyberpunk voice is a walking (or rather, talking) reference to Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series, complete with using fictional slang words like "Preem" and "Frag." The Necroid voice sounds ethereal, sinister and oddly seductive. Which works well for Empires that are trying to be aesthetically creepy or menacing. The Xenophile voice sounds like she's just happy to be of service and is by far the friendliest voice available. The Technocrat voice sounds like a cold and pragmatic scientist willing to do anything he can to unlock the secrets of the universe, consequences be damned. Which works very well for a more morally questionable Empire that focuses primarily on technology. Also, the Technocrat has by far one of the coolest one-liners when you declare war on an opposing Empire. "We shall cure them of their ignorance." The delivery is, as the saying goes, peak cinema.
So overall, Stellaris is a lot of fun once you learn how to play it properly. The hardest part is sticking with the game long enough to get to that point. Again, there's no shame in looking up guides and walkthroughs just to understand the many moving parts of a Paradox game. That being said, this game is heavily reliant on DLC expansion for most of its features. Stellaris by itself feels like a demo for another, better game without DLC. So if you want to get this game, do yourself a favor and get at least Utopia and Leviathans. Those two expansions add enough content to make the game worth playing at least once. The other DLCs add to the experience, yes, but they don't feel as important as those first two. So this game gets an unusual rating. Stellaris with no DLC gets a 3 out of 5 stars. It's competent, but rather bland due to a lack of actual content to engage with. But with DLC, Stellaris goes up to a 4 stars out of 5. It would be 5 stars if it weren't for the fact that buying every single DLC ever released would cost just as much money, possibly even more so than the game itself. The good news is that Paradox often puts discounts and sales on some of the more popular expansions, such as Federations and Nemesis. But this is definitely one of those games where you need to spend more than the initial fee to get the full experience, and that can and will be a turn off for anyone trying to enjoy the video gaming hobby while on a budget.
Stellaris is owned by Paradox Interactive. I have not created any of the images used in this review. Please support the original creators.
