Beyond Earth boasts several features to distinguish it from its parent franchise, but nearly all of them are half-baked or just flat-out inconsequential.
Hentzau: Yes, that’s rather sad, isn’t it. You touch down, have a look around and realise you’ve accidentally landed in a game of Civ 5. Jim: Well I mean the blurb is you and your fine faction being sent into deepest space to make Earth 2.0. Hentzau: Jim, why not quickly sum up what Beyond Earth is about.
But now I shall be…the only man…BEYOND IT Jim: I am the only man on Earth to hold that title, according to my Steam Friends list. Jim liked Endless Legend, so you’re getting both sides of the coin here. Given my recent tendency to randomly dislike 4xes for almost entirely subjective reasons, I have dragooned Jim into writing this review with me. What surprises me, however - and especially so for a Firaxis title - is that even if you take SMAC out of the equation, even when you compare Beyond Earth to the modern Civilization franchise that spawned it, I think it fundamentally still isn’t a very good game. Beyond Earth was never going to live up to Alpha Centauri’s better qualities, both real and imagined, and I’ve tried to take this into account when playing the thing Beyond Earth should be judged on its own merits, not the nostalgia-fuelled remembrance of a sixteen year-old predecessor. It’s doomed because no matter how good Firaxis made this game, by setting it around the colonisation of an alien world it draws inevitable comparison with one of Firaxis’ very first products: Alpha Centauri, a game that’s rightfully regarded as one of the genre’s absolute classics. Beyond Earth is a doomed-from-the-start attempt to shift the familiar Civilization empire-building action into the future.
0 kommentar(er)
