Thirteen1

As much as everyone loves firing birds from slingshots or making frogs bounce from cloud to cloud, sometimes you just have a craving for something a little more in depth and traditional.

Nothing could scratch that itch better than the classic empire building strategy genre, known as the 4X genre.

For those who are not familiar with that category, 4X is short for ‘explore, expand, exterminate, and exploit’ and while those core features appear in many strategy games, the 4X games generally max out the complexity & detail. These games saw a surge of popularity in the mid 90’s, with games like Master of Orion & Space Empires proving popular. One other title that came out during this time was Ascendancy, which was one of the better games to come out during that boom.

However roll on forward to 2011 and it seems that its time for the 4X genre to take a shot at entering the mobile market, so who better to lead the charge than The Logic Factory with a re-release of Ascendancy.
The game starts with you choosing from one of the 21 weird and wonderful races that inhabit the universe. From gas clouds to giant manta-ray things with cybernetic implants and even the occasional sentient puddle, the universe is a very interesting place to explore.

Each race has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, along with their own individual special abilities. In a game where the main aim is to be the supreme species in the universe, special skills like faster space travel or being able to force other races to make peace with you could make the difference between success or failure.

The goal as I have already stated is to become top-dog in the universe, but this is where the complexity of the game comes in. The natural go-to method for that is all out domination, declare war on anything else that moves and wipe them out.

With some races this is the best method as they are geared for war, but others are not so you will have to go with the diplomatic route. Whenever you enter the territory of another race, you will want to make contact with them. From here you can then offer to unite with them, offer them trades of technology & information – or if none of that works declare war on them anyway.

So you will be constantly trading with one race, while allied with another and fighting a war against yet another. This is the strength of the 4X genre, the complexity is exactly what fans of the genre crave. However for those times when you want a faster or simpler game, you can tweak the settings and start a smaller universe with less alien AI’s to come up against.

But it’s not all about the other races, you will also have to look after your own homeworld and colonies. Without that how can you expand your own species enough to take control. There are 3 core areas that you can develop. Research which allows you to gain access to new technology to enhance your planets and ships, Industry which determines how fast a colony can finish projects they are assigned and Prosperity which controls population growth and unit production.

However as you no doubt by now are starting to gather, this type of game is very much a niche market. Ascendancy really does require you to be a fan of the genre because it’s not exactly the most graphical game. The planets and the Star-map graphics are somewhat simplistic and the UI is quite frankly a maze.

As to gameplay, well be prepared to have a long game as even within a genre known for being slow, this can seem glacial at times. That in part is down to how steep the learning curve of the game is. The game would really benefit from a solid tutorial to go with the tips & help page.

This makes this a very difficult one to put a rating on really as it is going to be a true Marmite experience. If you’re a fan of this genre then you are absolutely going to love the depth of this game and the pure amount of replay value. If you are not then you may find the game slow and difficult to get to grips with.