Reach for the Stars (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 6.2 (3.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Bruce Geryk
• Reviewed on: 09/13/2000
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 09/14/2000
• Originally published on GameSpot: Reach for the Stars (PC) Review

Reach for the Stars was originally released by SSG back in 1983, when asterisks and ampersands were used to make graphics in computer games. Having created the game, codesigners Roger Keating and Ian Trout effectively launched the genre of 4-X space games - explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Seventeen years later, the statute of limitations on game titles must have expired because even though it's technically a sequel, SSG's latest release is still just called Reach for the Stars. While the recycled title suggests that SSG is trying to recapture the essence of its classic game, the modern version of Reach for the Stars suffers from the problem common to remakes: Instead of letting you relive the original, it just makes you miss playing the original.

Reach for the Stars is a conventional empire-building game set in space. Your task is to research new technologies, build advanced ships, explore neighboring star systems, and eventually conquer the galaxy as you expand your forces from your home planet. Along the way you'll encounter alien races, fight massive space battles, and invade enemy-held territory. In theory, it should be an engrossing game. Unfortunately, Reach for the Stars incorporates several design decisions that prevent it from achieving the standards set by its old predecessor or by other space-empire games that were built on the original Reach for the Stars' groundbreaking ideas.

Reach for the Stars plays out over a square map grid containing various star systems. Each system can have multiple planets, and these planets vary in levels of habitability for each race in the game. Once a planet has been colonized, you can develop it by building industrial, defense, research, shipyard, and training facilities. There are only six different building types total, and these can be upgraded from one level to another. Planets produce one new building per turn, assuming they have enough resource points to do so.

There are 16 different races in Reach for the Stars, although this total includes several types of humans. Each has a separate tech tree to research and different tolerances for various environmental conditions (like a methane atmosphere or high gravity), as well as different growth rates and trade benefits. Each race also has a different base rate of fire for space combat, which determines the number of times ships can fire in a given amount of time. This number ultimately seems to be more important than the other factors, as races with a high rate of fire seem to have a distinct advantage throughout the game whenever combat invariably ensues. Other factors that should balance out the rate of fire apparently do not.

The designers of Reach for the Stars state on the game's home page that they have "gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that giving orders in the game is as easy as possible." This is somewhat surprising, because the interface is possibly the game's weakest point - at least initially. At the outset, you're presented with a bewildering set of different buttons and displays, none of which make the slightest intuitive sense. There are tooltips on how to label each button, but these do little to explain what the buttons actually do. Because of this, Reach for the Stars is almost impossible to figure out by just jumping into the game. Even the tutorial doesn't adequately explain what's going on.

For this reason, learning to play Reach for the Stars requires a thorough reading of the manual. This is a problem largely because the manual has no index and is badly organized. Even experienced strategy-game players will find the manual a necessity, and it is written so that the only way to figure out the game is to read the manual from cover to cover, since the layout is not conducive to skimming. Novice players unprepared for this will quickly become frustrated at the inability to just start playing the game. This will undoubtedly prevent many people from getting to the point where the interface shows its benefits, but once you've become used to the interface, things do become easier.

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