So you build more ships and attempt to be everywhere at once. But the AI won’t tap out, because the rules don’t really allow it. It’s the kind of thing that makes you sympathize with Mass Effect’s Reapers: extinguishing all enemy life in the universe is tedious beyond words. While I could exterminate everything, I had a hell of a time trying to keep up with the settler spam, and started building mini-fleets to camp every single planet in the galaxy. Part of it is the AI will colonize literally every single world, including barren rocks. I spent four hours sending fleets across the galaxy to exterminate enemies and still couldn’t bring my game to a conclusion. Since you can only win by conquering the galaxy or forcing everyone into an alliance, a game of StarDrive is over long before it is technically finished. Where it truly lost me, however, was the endgame. The various races are indistinct and generic, but at least the AI is nicely aggressive. Customization? I’ve seen it done far worse. What’s frustrating is that StarDrive really wasn’t that bad for most of the time I spent with it, it’s just that I could never identify anything that was particularly good or special. Ground combat is even more pointless it comes down to weight of numbers landing on an enemy planet, and usually I just decided it was easier to “glass” planets with superweapons than to storm them. Fighters and supply shuttles are routinely unable to land aboard carriers, which then demands some post-battle micromanagement to fix. The cruiser is just a bigger version of the frigate, and the titan is just a bigger version of the cruiser. Space battles play out like a very crude RTS, and the ship art is so repetitive that it looks like clone fleets are flying circles around one another. After all that, actually taking these ships into combat isn't a good payoff. StarDrive also makes the insane demand that every single square on a ship be filled with some kind of component, which means you’ll spend a lot of time just planting extra armor and cargo slots just to fill out a ship design rather than from any real need. The pre-made ship designs aren’t really very good, but making your own versions gets pretty tedious, and is hellishly difficult with the largest ship designs thanks to interface limitations. Then you can just hit the requisition button and the fleet will be auto-constructed. You can click and drag ship designs onto a grid to set the formation of your forces, then give them their rules of engagement: who will charge in for close-range damage, who will snipe from a distance, and who will protect the carriers. On the one hand, fleet management is really quite good. Finally, there’s the combat, which at least has a bit more depth than the rest of StarDrive even if it doesn't pan out in the end. The result: I destroyed a longstanding alliance because I made an insulting offer, all because I didn’t memorize the tech tree. You can trade technologies, but the interface for doing so doesn’t actually tell you the relative value of the techs you are attempting to trade. Diplomacy is also a bit frustrating: you’ll get warnings from other races not to colonize a given star system because they have claimed it, but you can’t tell them to stay the hell out of your home system. Unfortunately, none of this personality comes through in their behavior, where every AI player has exactly the same priorities.

To its credit, the art is nicely drawn and some of the characters are enjoyably odd, like the Lovecraft-inspired Ralyeh (space Cthulus) and the Cordrazine, a race of crazed, slave-taking mollusks.

But a space 4X game is really about imperial competition with exotic alien races, which is why StarDrive is packed with memorable characters like. There's space and time to build every kind of building on each planet, thanks to StarDrive’s ponderous pacing and stingy building variety, and in no time at all I found myself ruling over an empire of dozens of completely interchangeable worlds. Managing each new planet you colonize or conquer is interesting at first, but quickly rendered insignificant via technological progress and a lack of a need to specialize. No matter which race you play, you’ll still be either conquering the galaxy or trying to unite it into a grand alliance, so there can’t be any diversity in play styles. Regardless of bonuses, every race quickly converges on a fairly generic approach to galactic conquest thanks to StarDrive’s dearth of victory conditions and its uninteresting, predictable tech tree. You choose from one of eight different spacefaring races (or customize your own) each with their own traits – but nothing in this decision really matters much. Need more detail? Okay, but I tried to spare us both.

Stardrive 2 resolve combat issue