As a reboot of one of the most beloved strategy game series of all time, Master of Orion was always going to have a tough hill to climb. Namely, it must answer the question: “Why does this exist?” Happily for MOO, it has a strong answer to this: it’s an entry-level strategy game. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of work to be done beyond that.
The Master of Orion series is what’s called a space “4X” series, short for “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.” You start from one planet, and expand your empire to take over the galaxy -- it’s like Civilization in space. MOO’s empires are pure sci-fi goofiness, adapted from the rest of the series: humans, yes, but also the catlike Mrrshan, the robotic Meklar, the genius Psilons, and the intelligent warlike space bears called the Bulrathi. M OO is turn-based on the grand strategy scale, with fast and shiny , if overly simple, combat between fleets.
This series reboot from Wargaming.net -- currently in early access on Steam and GOG --includes these races and generally goes all-out in trying to adapt the tone of Master of Orion 2, the best-loved of the original series. From the calming sci-fi music to the wide-ranging empire customization to the desert, tundra, or irradiated planets, to the specifics of the tech tree, it all looks familiar to an old fan. But perhaps more important than that, the new Master of Orion tries to engage with potential new fans of space strategy.
The first thing I noticed when playing Master of Orion was how crisp it is. For a complicated strategy game of moving fleets, colonizing planets, and arranging spies, it’s really easy to tell what and where everything is at a glance. It’s clean, clear, and attractive. But above all, it’s simple. In a genre that usually tries to include everything, Master of Orion deliberately tries to remain accessible.
It’s almost like a board game in its elegant simplicity.
My favorite example is the workers on a planet. They’re shown as cute little pixel art representations of their race, distributed across the three main resources of the game: research, food, and production. Each individual slot has a number underneath it showing how many resources they can generate -- for example, a “gaia” planet has its first slot make 5 food, while a mineral-poor planet has only 2 production. And that’s all shown clearly, with adjustments easy to make. It’s almost like a board game in its elegant simplicity.
But that simplicity has a price: it’s easily exploitable. Master of Orion doesn’t want to complicate matters too much. So you can develop your planets by churning out food to get to the population max, and dominate the galaxy with ease from that point, because there aren’t any complicated uncontrollable negative side effects of maxing out population.
It’s like this through much of the Early Access version of Master of Orion: for everything it does well there’s an aspect that needs improvement. One issue that many space grand strategy games have is a lack of a physical map in space. MOO fixes that by having a solid map of wormholes connecting to systems, creating specific routes and the possibilities for strategic chokepoints. But the negative side effect is that this makes movement incredibly slow. It regularly takes dozens of turns to move across even a relatively small empire.
This leads to Master of Orion almost always feeling too slow, especially in the early game. It’s quite common to go dozens or even hundreds of turns without facing significant pressure or critical strategic choices. More than anything, this is what MOO needs to solve for the final release: a motivating force for players through the entirety of the game.
Rowan Kaiser is a contributor to IGN. He's always willing to talk turkey about strategy games with you on Twitter at @rowankaiser.
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