Stellaris: Console Edition Review – IGN

By TJ Hafer

If you're wondering which PC-centric genre would be the least likely to work with a gamepad, a great Stellaris race strategy game would be at the top of the list. But to my surprise, the team behind the console edition of Paradox's space opera sandbox was able to do a really nice job of translating the controls. Coming from the PC version, however, I can not help but notice that they have worn a long and outdated version of Stellaris, which still has serious gambling problems that have been solved for quite some time now. Closing – and man, is it hard to go back.

If you've never watched Stellaris before, the reasons to get excited about Console Edition are many. It's one of the most ambitious and innovative 4X space games of the last decade. You can control the design of the government and the main species of your empire by using a variety of tasty and punchy feature choices, which allows you to be an iron-wrestling dictatorship of the bloodthirsty turtles, to a peaceful technocracy led by a kind of worm creature. the underlying biology, I do not even want to guess. The portraits you can choose include enough strange, memorable and sometimes hilarious strangers to fill the Mos Eisley Cantina many times.

Once on the stunning star map, the most important factor that sets Stellaris ahead of similar games is the efficiency with which it creates the illusion of being part of a living organic galaxy – and not just a board game inspired by the theme of space. Where series such as Master of Orion and Civilization have furthered the idea that you have to play a specific way in pursuit of a set of specific goals, Stellaris simply allows you to explore, experiment and decide on the success criteria you want to achieve. alone. There are some well-defined victory conditions, like owning a certain number of planets, but I can not say that I have paid much attention to it. To pursue the goals that I had imagined for my empire, whether to find and raise as many civilizations prior to the FTL as possible or to declare a crusade against all undemocratic despots is always more entertaining. And this is only made more enjoyable on one of my favorite sheet music.

The depth to which these interstellar societies are modeled is also much deeper than average and adds a great deal of flavor and dimension to each campaign. Your citizens can form political factions based on specific ideologies, for example, who will be pleased or dissatisfied with the way you choose to govern. If you allow slavery, the egalitarian faction will not please you, but the authoritarian faction will blush if you abolish such practices, which could provoke a rebellion in a world where they have a lot of power. Sound familiar? The types of scenarios that may arise are beyond the scope of the traditional 4X game and allow Stellaris to be both highly repeatable and to become a formidable springboard to the big genre of strategy.

Paradox games are known to have menus on the menus, but they are all fairly easy to access with the d-pad and a clever use of the screen. From time to time, it sometimes happens that some difficult points stand up, such as the difficulty sometimes of ordering a given ship to a specific place with the help of the cursor. And at the end of the game, the timeline that allows you to quickly select all of your planets and fleets can become a bit crowded. The only way to navigate is to use the d-pad, which is quite slow when there are a lot of entries. I wondered why I could not press the currently unused L1 and R1 buttons to quickly move from one category to another.

My biggest disappointment, however, is that Console Edition is based on Stellaris 1.7, which makes it obsolete for about a year and a half compared to the PC version. And for a game of Paradox, a developer known to dramatically evolve its games, it makes a difference. Update 2.0 has completely redesigned the war and the management of the empire has been redefined. Problems such as tedious mouse and cat fleet chases and the heavily loaded planetary tile system are even more striking, knowing what a life without them looks like. Leading with 1.7 was not the best step forward and it's a decision I have trouble understanding. It's really hard to go back to a version that does not include these very important changes that have made Stellaris a much better game.

The other moderately boring thing I noticed is that the maximum gaming speed, even on a PS4 Pro, is significantly slower than that of my five-year-old Core-i7 processor, capable of running on a PC. And since Stellaris 1.7 was already a game in which a lot of time could go by without this happening, it can lead to long periods of trouble waiting for technologies to search or a new colony. end. Beyond that, the performance is quite stable. You may notice image loss here and there in big space battles, but it's not that bad.

One of the ways that Console Edition can keep things in place is to remove some galaxy configuration options from the PC version. On PC, for example, you can generate a galaxy with up to 1000 star systems (or even more with mods if your system can handle it). The largest size of the galaxy on the console is 600 star systems, and the number of AI empires that can be generated is much more limited. It's still pretty big, but it's a little disappointing if you're looking for a real space opera with dozens of competing powers.