Do you have an interest in space 4X strategy games? If no, then you probably weren’t that interested in the mechanics anyway. Let’s try and short-cut the tedious part of the review where I explain basic mechanics. Unfortunately I can imagine Doctor Frankenstein thinking much the same thing about his creation, and look how that turned out. Prior to actually playing Master Of Orion I thought this was an approach that would have stood a fairly decent chance of producing a worthwhile game. I was therefore rather surprised to discover that this new Master Of Orion really is a faithful attempt to remake Master Of Orion 2 for modern audiences, using an almost Frankenstein-like approach of trying to bolt together the original game’s constituent parts together fully intact.

It would be difficult to make a shooter out of Master Of Orion - you don’t bring that license back unless you fully intend to make a space-based 4X of some kind - but I was expecting it to be ultimately just as superficial a relationship as the Syndicate FPS had to the original 1993 corporate murder simulator. Usually whoever’s taken (or has been handed by a publisher) the license keeps the theming and subject matter but otherwise ends up making the game that they (or the publisher) want to make, which often ends up being a shooter of some kind. This new Master Of Orion is a more literal take on the common practice of graverobbing the final resting places of much-loved classic games for their licences than I’ve seen in the past, however. Yes, I suppose that after the flood of pale imitations we’ve suffered through in recent years, it was only a matter of time until somebody dug up the body parts of the actual Master Of Orion series and tried to reassemble them into a modern game.

Master of orion 2 races