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Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price (approx)	$20 US
Operating System	Mac OS 9.1+ OS X 10.1.5+
Available from	MacSoft

Masters of Orion 3 (MoO3 for short) is, as the name suggests, the third in a series of excellent turn-based strategy/megalomaniac game; it has been referred to by many as 'the great game that could have been'. Unfortunately I have to agree with the many on this one but, before I get into that, let's just start from the start and tell you a bit about the game itself.

In MoO3, like the versions which went before it, the mission is to pick an alien race (including those stinking humans), or make your own alien race, then go out into the galaxy and build your race up from its home on one planet in a system, into galaxy-dominating overlords! <insert evil laugh here>

Now, there are three ways in which you can do this. The first and most simple way is by getting yourself elected as president of the Orion senate and, while there may not be any supreme courts - and you certainly can't rely on your daddy to pay your way - becoming president is not that difficult.

The next, and perhaps most obvious, way to win is to wipe out every other race in the game. While (virtual) genocide is always a thrill, this mission is by far the most time consuming and difficult task of all.

Finally you can also win by discovering ancient artifacts left behind by an Elder race, and though the documentation that comes with the game hypes this as the ultimate way to win, all it really requires is patience and a lot of your time (though not as much as wiping five other races off the face of the galaxy requires).

Who would ever want to be these guys?

The tall and the short of it
So that sounds all good and dandy, right? Well it is and it isn't. First of all, despite the hype that the interface was going to be usable and a revolution for MoO-type games, it isn't. There is still too much information, and too much of it is hidden away through multiple slipping and sliding and thunking interfaces. For example, even though a Sitrep is provided which tells you all the stuff that's going on in your empire, it's not very well organised. There's just some colour coding that frankly looks like it was an afterthought, and it can take 20 minutes or more just to get through before you can get onto other things you have to do this turn (oh, and one game I am playing is at 556 turns and climbing). Even if it had been split into simple categories such as political, social infrastructure, military infrastructure and events, it would have been much, much better.

As it is MoO3 has tried to find a balance between those who want to control every little bit of their empire - right down to the most fiddly detail - and for those who just want to play megalomaniac and who prefer to delegate all that fiddly stuff to AI-controlled viceroys; and it has failed. The viceroys are not smart enough to trust with too much delegation, and at the same time are too insistent about putting their noses into everything for the people who want a handle on everything to manage.

Also the game itself is being patched every so often (which is improving it), but it feels somewhat like you are in a beta test except you've actually bought a product (rumours suggest the real beta testers came back and point-blank said that it was no fun prompting many last-minute changes).

That said, somehow I still enjoy the game - it is very, very addictive.

	Pros Genocide is fun (don't look at me like that) Addictive Ruling the Galaxy with an iron fist/tentacle/whatever is great Will run on lowish-spec machines and can be played multi-player Cons Bad interface, missing features The in-game cut scenes bite Viceroys don't work very well The computer AI is not very challenging Multi-player takes too long to be plausible
Just look at my glorious empire!

© Parkside Media 2004
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