Ascendancy

The Good
Graphically beautiful, with a nice tech tree and plenty of interesting structures to build on and around your planets. The galaxy is modeled in three dimensions, which (as far as this reviewer knows) was a first in this genre. There are a lot of races to choose from, and the game itself can be customized extensively, so in theory you could play it forever.

The Bad
Politics and diplomacy are minimal, and ship design and combat are extremely lacking -- basically, the bigger the ship the better, so there aren't really any interesting tradeoffs to make. The three dimensional galaxy helps cover up the weak AI opponent, since the jumpgate system forces you to move through bottlenecks and generally limits you to frontal assaults. The races are many, but they just don't have a whole lot of personality when compared to those in Master of Orion.

The Bottom Line
There are good things about Ascendancy, but too many bad things along with them. I recommend that you resist the temptation to pick up this game, and stick to MOO and MOO2 instead.

The Good
There are lots of space conquest sims on the market, but "Ascendancy" is the most different of the bunch.

It's not much different from most space conquest sims except that this game offers REALLY different races; as opposed to just "this race gets a slight defense bonus, this race gets a slight ground combat bonus," Ascendancy races play very differently and, (the coolest thing about the game), have victory conditions for each race that don't involve conquest. For one race, you win if you can convince everyone to be at peace with everyone else!

The Bad
Planet management is very, very repetitive and boring. It's good stuff but there's just too much repetition.

The game's major drawback, though, is the astoundingly bad AI. Enemies are mind-bogglingly dumb and overly easy to defeat.

The Bottom Line
I know it's bad English, but this is the most unique take on the genre I've ever seen. Worth playing.

The Good
This game does take a little effort (but not too much) to get into but, boy, does it pay off! The graphics are still very crisp and attractive and even rival that of certain brand new strategy games - for a 13 year old game, that's not bad at all!

But there's also the incredibly orchestric music which remains so recognisable and easily trumps the pseudo-modern beat music you find in far too many new games.

The game itself is highly addictive, with the search for new suitable planets while expanding your army being a constant drive to expand. The strategy side isn't too complex yet it's surprisingly deep.

The combat is lots of fun too with the explosions still feeling really sweet. Blowing up alien ships has to be one of the most fun elements of Ascendancy.

The Bad
Well, I have to agree with the biggest criticisms that the game has received in the past.

First of all, the AI isn't that great. There has been a patch that improves it but the original unpatched game saw the AI really badly manage planets. Every planet you captured, you had to completely rebuild from scratch. The AI never posed a real challenge.

The second problem with the game is that some might find the macromanagement tedious after you've captured 50 planets. Maintaining such a large amount of planets means a lot of work and nearly every day you have to create several buildings, start constructing a new ship, etc. My advice is: stick to smaller universes with fewer aliens to compete with. The moment you tackle a large universe, you're doomed to give up out of boredom.

The Bottom Line
This really is a different take on Master of Orion. The difference is that you have much better control over combat and have to maintain planets on a much smaller level. You constantly have to research more, upgrade buildings, build better ships, explore new solar systems, colonize new planets.

This game can really suck you in. 13 years old yet when I played it recently in Dosbox, I couldn't tear myself away from the screen until I had vanquished my opponents! My entire day went up in smoke, something which for me, few modern games are capable of achieving.