Which leads me to this point: I created an account here on metacritic, because I am fed up with this simplification mantra and the dumbing down of strategy games. They were the same exercises in the limitations of terrain and the reduction of strategy. At the moment of writing this I have 30 hours into this game and have played four games (all massive, all standard) which I purposely chose a new path each time. They feel exactly the same, look exactly the same, and do everything exactly the same. The ruler themselves and the faction they represent aren't unique in the slightest. The figurehead in Civilization Beyond Earth have snippets of information included in the loading screen showing the leaders outlook of the pre-planetfall situation which can be summed to the same 2 sentences about how all hope was lost, or that they are more ambitious than the rest and going to claim the galaxy for themselves. They had unique story elements, unique faction dialogue and communications and a plot. The first thing I notice is the technically inferior selection of "sponsors" (factions.) that you have available to you (Compared to the base game of Civilization 5 of 16) - While this may be in more aligned with Alpha Centauri's faction selection and yet further expanded on by minor bonuses you can select upon planetfall, it fails to really touch 1 major problem: The fact is that the factions in Alpha Centauri were massively developed. As the developers noted several times, it was suppose to be a spiritual successor to the game, and repeated the mantra: "We made this for you" (Alpha Centauri fans) Unfortunately, with such a huge monolith in the field the game cannot stand a chance. It however, has the unfortunate pleasure of being compared to Alpha Centauri and it's expansion pack Alien Crossfire. Now, if Civilization Beyond Earth was released without any Hype or expectations I had for it, this game would have been scored higher. First: I won't be repeating a lot of what's being said. I think I have a pretty good background in the field of strategy games. I've been playing Civilization games since the second game came out, and I've played pretty much every strategy game that has been released for English and German. I've been playing Civilization games since the second game came out, and Is this game bad? No.