Showtime At The Apollo4X - [INDIEGAMING]

Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate. The four "X"es of the genre that has spanned for years and across so many different settings. Fantasy, modern, science fiction, and everything conceivable in between have been covered by those four simple words. Some of the most fondly remembered games of all time come from this genre, as it provides such a quintessentially PC experience. So any time another 4X title comes out, it's definitely worth attention. And that's where Apollo4X from Digital Entertainment, recently released on Steam, comes into play.

For starters, Apollo4X is barely a 4X title. There's minimal exploration, as nearly the entire galaxy is revealed and known to from the very beginning, and any development doesn't feel like you're expending and exploiting natural resources. You do expand, and there is some combat, but it all feels so tertiary and unimportant to raising numbers to reach the victory point conditions.

What Apollo4X is, however, is a trading empire simulator. The use of the term simulator is loose here, as it's extremely simplified. Everything is built around chance, from the procedurally generated galaxy at the beginning, to the choice of corporations on the planets you colonize, to what goods you'll have on those planets near your home planet to create your trade networks. Luckily you mainly deal with trades in your own colonies, and don't have to worry about interacting with other empires, except for the evil Centaurs which you can sometimes clash with if they close in on your home planets. Depending on how your galaxy rolls out, it may be an extremely long time before you encounter the enemy aliens, if at all.

Without rival trading empires, the game is honestly rather boring. You create a few trade routes every turn and your constantly growing resources do mean that you do get to build some upgrades to your colonies, but no matter how much you grow or upgrade, the game doesn't give you any tangible sense of advancement. It's unsatisfying and a labour to continue playing.

When you start the game, you are thrown into configuring your settings for the new game, and to the game's credit, there are a good variety of options, from how many enemies you might encounter exist, to how many planets are in the galaxy, and how wealthy or easy to develop the planets tend to be. You can definitely tailor the game well to your expectations of Apollo4X, but I'm not sure you'll have very high expectations to begin with.

After setting your game up, you are thrust into the galaxy generation, where you will choose your starting colonies and establish corporations before your first turn. What do these do? The game certainly won't tell you, because this has no tutorial and no reliable source of information about your objective or functions you can perform in the game. There is an hour long YouTube video you can watch which will lead you through the game's functions, but that's simply not acceptable for a game with this many interactions and functions to inform your player about. There is also a manual available on the Apollo4X website, but at the time I was playing, the link through Steam provided me with a 404 error.

Apollo4X is a mess, and it's unfortunate, because I do enjoy trading empire games. I've had a spent a great deal of time in games like Civilization and Transport Tycoon. I consider Master of Magic to be the greatest video game of all time. Apollo4X just lacks the substance to pull me towards it and I expect even fans of the 4X or trading genre games will quickly be pulled away from it. If the idea of managing trade routes without interacting with other industries interests you, then this is probably going to be up your alley, but I don't see much else here for anyone.

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