As a person that doe not play many strategy games I will say this:

Positives: This game is very easy to get used to, after only about 5 hours I knew the basics of the game, with the basics down it allowed to to continue playing the game without getting bored, this enabled me to learn more about the mechanics and enjoy the game more!

Vast world, even without the expansions the game can be a time sinker (it took me 50 hours before I bought the expansions), with many elements such as fallen empires, random encounters, end game crisis, etc. this does keeps your attention on the game and does not let you get bored easily.

Immersive experience, once you get into the game you can choose out of one of the pre-build factions, or create your own. This means that your empire can be anything you want to be, it the encourages you to follow the ethics you have selected, with other federations either hating or loving you for it. This allows you to form alliances or remain to stand alone and after a while, you really care for the empire that you have created.

Visuals, for a game this big its impressive that the visuals are still fun to watch, from blowing up planets to watching massive space battles.


Negatives: The biggest issue with this game is performance, once you enter the end game and you've build up your fleet it is not uncommon for the game to crash as it simply cannot handle all of the units on the map, it is also common for the game to become unbearably slow to respond causing great frustration, I have a fairly strong set-up, I thought that for any CPU intensive game my I7-7700k would be enough but apparently not.

Features, some features of the game are unpolished and it seems that they should simply not be there, for example the planetary assaults are simply something that you have to do, they are not in any way engaging and more of an after thought, when playing xenophobic empires I always choose to blowup most of the planets that are not useful to me in the way of resources.

Late game, in the late game at a certain point you are simply too powerful to have any meaningful engagement with the other empires, it just becomes a matter of taking over the entire galaxy, and thus it becomes boring, and the AI simply cannot handle it, they do not unite against you, and they keep fighting each other when they should really focus on you.

Overall, I would recommend playing this game, the negatives I have mentioned can be overcome by playing on a smaller map size and setting an end game to come earlier. In my opinion positives overcome the negatives and its worth a try especially if the game is on sale.
Noice