Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.5 stars Outstanding
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 9.1 (4.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Jeff Lackey
• Reviewed on: 02/28/2007
• Released on: 02/14/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar (PC) Review

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords was on most strategy-game-of-the-year awards lists in 2006, garnering praise from many as the best space-based "4X" (exploring, expanding, exploiting, exterminating) game ever released for the PC. That's a tough act to follow, yet somehow Stardock has managed to produce an add-on package that elevates the game to an even higher level of strategy gaming excellence. Dark Avatar accomplishes this via subtle tweaks in a wide range of existing features combined with some totally new elements that significantly expand the depth and breadth of an already excellent game.

Many of the improvements can be termed "minor," yet they have a significant impact. The graphics in Dread Lords were fine, but Dark Avatar improves the quality of the visuals in just about every aspect of the game. The ships in particular are noticeably more detailed, and a slew of new parts in the ship designer provide you with the ability to reproduce anything from the U.S.S. Enterprise to a flying milk truck. Users have already posted some incredible home-brew ships on the Internet. Weapon effects and resulting explosions have also been improved. The technology-tree interface has undergone a graphics face-lift that results in a much easier-to-use presentation of the branching technology pathways, although it can still take a little work to determine precisely what techs are required to build a certain type of ship. These and many other tweaks and improvements on existing features are what you might expect in an add-on to an already superb game.

But Dark Avatar introduces some completely new features that create fresh challenges and options. One of the most profound changes is the nature of planets. In Dread Lords, all planets could be colonized by every civilization, which resulted in an early game rush to grab every planet possible, with an emphasis on the richest worlds. The best strategy was always to focus on being first to the planets. Dark Avatar's universe is more realistically hostile, with planets having a variety of environments, many of them uninhabitable to most civilizations unless they either natively possess the capability to prosper in that environment or spend the considerable time and resources to develop the technology to render the world livable. Planets exhibit a wide variety of environments; thus, your choice of what to research is critical: You may spend weeks developing the capability to tame a radioactive world, only to find that there is only one radioactive planet but three prime planets that require aquatic capabilities. If you're a civilization with the native ability to populate a certain type of hostile planet, you'll have to debate the value of trading that valuable capability against keeping it to yourself. Building a civilization of planets is a much more complex and challenging undertaking than in Dread Lords.

Espionage now requires you to develop agents, which takes time and money. Once you have an active agent, you can place it on an opponent's planet and foil your opponent's attempts to build planetary upgrades at the same time that your agent gathers intelligence. You will also need agents to engage in counterespionage to nullify enemy agents placed on your planets. This results in little cat-and-mouse games as you and your foes try to spy on each other as long as possible before your agents are caught and eliminated. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any negative consequence to having an agent caught spying; we never received any messages from an opposing civilization protesting our espionage on its planet.

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