Stellaris the game where you become the ruler of a newborn Galactic Empire well I say the ruler of an Empire but it’s more like 1 planet. Your first job is to design your species, empire, and Government. This is a lot of fun you get to design your Government to be dictator, democracy, tribunal, if you love all species hate all other species and much more. You get to choose from a variety of species like Giant Birds, boring Humans, some Random Robot, the angriest Mushroom you’ve ever seen and my personal favorite a sentient floating barnacle with tentacles. A variety of traits like long living, intelligent, hoarder, sparse, nomads etc. What I’m trying to say is this whatever you want your empire to be it can be or it can become.

Now onto the game what do you really do? Well it’s essentially a strategy game where you manage your new empire. You constantly research new technology to better your empire, send out colony ships explore and settle new solar systems and eventually have to deal with everyone’s favorite mystery aliens. There are 3 types of aliens, xenophobic (hate you) xenophile (love you) and those dudes, I mean they exist but they don’t really matter. You can deal with aliens however you want, make peace, make war I mean you can even intermarry with them. When I made an empire I looked at all the human esc races and selected a floating barnacle instead, honestly how creatures with no hands, legs, mouth or eyes can not only venture into space but have intelligent negotiations is beyond me but I guess it just works. My start was uneventful as my floating barnacle’s easily colonized about 10 empty solar systems I fought about 30 pirates and then finished my colonization. My scout ship finally met an alien species that was essentially chickens with opposable thumbs, terrifying truly terrifying. Being the qualified tentacled barnacle I was I engaged the birds in war and quite surprisingly won, after engulfing the enemies I had to decide what to do with them. I eventually made the decision to just leave them where they were. I continued to consume empty solar systems and upgrade my species until I met more aliens robots! They just kind of demolished me and I demolished them until we came to a standstill and nothing more happened.

Honestly, this is a really fun game if you have the time for it. However you need a fairly decent computer or else this game wont work. Seriously, this game is a lot of fun and definitely worth buying if it’s on sale.