Perhaps crime doesn't pay - but what if you were an elephant? Or a dragon? Or a nightmare creature? In those cases, you may have an entirely different concept of what 'pay' means. The Slender Man, I'm guessing, does not take a wage. Dragons are hoarders. Elephants just want to get them some fruit, bark and leaves. For sixteen hours a day. Or else they'll starve to death.

The point is, Liberty City is a very different place if you're running over pedestrians as anyone other than a traumatised war veteran - and GTA IV modder indirivacua has a talent for, well, adding psychotic safari animals and mythological creatures to Grand Theft Auto IV. We've spent a lot of time trying to figure out who Grand Theft Auto V's protagonist is going to be - but honestly, I'd rather it be farm animal. Seriously. Rockstar? Keep the voice actor. That's fine. Just let me play as a horse. Let me play out the tragedy of a world-weary horse of action.

Here, via PCGamesN, is an elephant running people over:



Here's a giraffe.



Here's a man punching the Slender Man until he falls down.



A dragon, who appears to be hammered.



Finally: indirivacua's horse, taking it to the limit.

Games projects on the crowd-funding website Kickstarter have now raised over $50 million in 2012 alone, making them the biggest project type by funding. That's more than 12 times as much as all three previous years put together - the hilarious graph above gives you some idea.

Kickstarter itself has grown massively, of course, but the games explosion is wildly disproportionate to that: last year, only 3.6% of funding pledged through the site was spent on games. This year, the proportion is six times as much - 23%.

The boom started with Double Fine's adventure game project, whose unprecedented success attracted enough media attention to make Kickstarter a household name among gamers.

Since then, million-dollar success stories have become almost commonplace. The latest is Planetary Annihilation - a huge-scale RTS with maps that span multiple worlds - which has just hit $1.5 million.

Seeing big industry names like Tim Schafer using the service has given Kickstarter a trustworthiness among gamers that's contributed to this huge increase in pledges. It's worth being aware, though, that Kickstarter themselves don't guarantee you'll get what a project promises, and won't refund your money if you don't. The person you're trusting when you back a Kickstarter project is the project creator, and trust is the operative word.

A memory edit for open world swordfish-'em-up Sleeping Dogs has freed up camera control, allowing you to roam the streets of Hong Kong in first person. Or second person, if you fancy shifting the camera over into the passenger seat. It also adds support for head tracking, something modder Racer_S has previously worked into Need For Speed: The Run.

It's still a little rough around the edges - turn the camera too quickly while driving in the first person and you'll be treated to a horrifying cross-section of Wei's face, like you're a ghost haunting the body of an undercover policeman. Or a camera clipped inside a video game character's face mesh. One or the other.

It's probably best treated for now as an immersive way of roaming the game's impressive rendition of Hong Kong - attempting to throw someone into a furnace or leap from a speeding bike onto a sportscar from this perspective seems like a recipe for disaster. Check out Tom's Sleeping Dogs review for more on the game, from the good (that city, those swordfish) to the bad (that story).



The mod is available from Racer_S's website, and there's also a thread on the official Sleeping Dogs forum. Hat-tip to DSOGaming for the heads up.

The Borderlands 2 website has launched this handy little skill picker, allowing you to explore the skill trees of the game’s four complex classes: Commando, Assassin, Siren or Gunzerker.

The problem with so many RPG-inspired games is you don’t know which class you want to be until you’ve played them, but using this app lets you dig right into their high level powers, spending points as you would in the game, to get a sense of the tantalising unlocks that await.

Being a sneaky, dishonest sort more suited to the shadows of this world, I rather like the idea of the Assassin class with a focus on the Bloodshed skill-set, which replenishes health for melee kills and, at its highest level, lets you chain kills to remain cloaked indefinitely.

Then again, the Gunzerker does have a skill called “Sexual Tyrannosaurus”...

Some cheeky blighters have obtained what Activision are calling a “development demo build” of Black Ops 2, and uploaded a vid to prove it. It’s an extremely short snippet of action, and overlayed with a superfluous dev interview and some dreadful music, but it does show off the capabilities of the engine.

Spotted on Kotaku, the video sees the player activate a no-clip mode, allowing the camera to zip off, around and above a rather pretty hillside township - which the player then proceeds to fill the the bodies of his foes. A crossbow makes a brief cameo and the video ends with the player running about making 'finger guns' at the enemy - a returning weapon from previous CoDs accessible via the 'giveall' cheat.

The original video has been removed, as you’d expect, but it came from the channel of Call of Duty modder iHc James. Kotaku still have a working version at the time of writing, if you are that needy of your BlOps fix.

Big picture mode is nigh! In a profile of Valve Corporation, the New York Times reports that Steam's much anticipated big picture mode will go into beta on Monday. Valve say it'll bring "simple, easy-to-read navigation designed specifically for TV" letting players flop back into their sofas without having to debase themselves with the frail hardware of the current console crop.

"Steam’s big-picture mode doesn’t require any additional development from you," Valve assures developers on the official big picture mode site. "Just ensure your game works well with a controller, and we’ll take care of the rest. And don’t worry, keyboard and mouse aren’t going anywhere — users will be able to switch between input devices at any time."

There's no word from Valve yet on how this "public test" of the feature will unravel - but we'll update as soon as we hear.

This article originally appeared in issue 243 of PC Gamer UK.

Lee Young Ho sits in the lobby of the Anaheim Hilton hotel. He’s five feet ten, wearing a black and white jacket, and armed with an easy, toothy smile. He flashes it at his friends as they chat among themselves. Around them swarm suited Japanese businessmen trailing wheeled suitcases; American families clad in various-sized versions of the same khaki-coloured shorts on their way to Disneyland; and transplanted Texans in stetsons and buttoned-up dress shirts, their faces pink and swollen from the Californian heat outside. Few eyes flick toward Lee Young Ho.

Five hundred metres down the road and two hours later, and Lee Young Ho is waiting to come on stage. He’s still with his friends – off to the left of the dais and shrouded in darkness – but his smile has dropped. He talks behind his hand. His eyes scan a space so massive it could comfortably house a few Boeing 747s.

He’s called by a bellowing announcer – the syllables extended longer with each phase of his Korean name – and he steps out in front of the crowd assembled for Major League Gaming’s Anaheim Spring Championship. Eight thousand people roar in unison. All eyes are locked directly on Lee Young Ho.



Lee Young Ho is better known as Flash, at least outside of his native South Korea. As Flash, he’s been playing StarCraft: Brood War professionally for five years. More importantly, he’s been winning. Flash’s record is superlative: since joining the Korean StarCraft scene in 2007, he’s notched up 17 first place finishes in major tournaments, and broken StarCraft’s Elo record (a measure of relative skill level devised for chess players) a staggering six times – all previous records having been set by Lee himself.

His appearance at MLG Anaheim is a major coup for Blizzard, the developer of both the original StarCraft and its sequel. It’s this newer game that Flash and friends are here to play – for the first time in front of a crowd, all eight of them will play StarCraft II.

StarCraft: Brood War still clings to dominance in South Korea. Teams are established entities with mad, corporate names: CJ Entus, KT Rolster. The country’s army and airforce both have teams, made up from ex-professionals drafted in by virtue of the country’s mandatory military service. All are overseen by established Korean e-sports bodies, monolithic organisations such as KeSPA: the Korean e-Sports Association.



KeSPA appear almost comically inflexible – a player once faced disqualification in a tournament for requesting a pause with the letters ‘pp’. The tournament’s decided code was ‘ppp’. KeSPA has been cool on the concept of StarCraft II since its launch in 2010. Understandably so, to some – as an organisation built around one core game, to jettison that title is to risk losing a decade’s worth of fans. But corporate wranglings have also halted the organisation’s switchover to a newer, prettier, e-sport. The rise of StarCraft in South Korea was such a freak occurrence that developers Blizzard never built the financial infrastructure to allow other companies to rebroadcast footage. With StarCraft II, the developer decided they wouldn’t make the same mistake. Blizzard were unable to reach broadcast terms with KeSPA before the launch of StarCraft II, meaning the Korean company were unable to show the game on TV or online. The smaller, nimbler GomTV stepped into the void, and became South Korea’s only licenced e-sports broadcaster. KeSPA – with its stable of preternaturally gifted pro-gamers – stayed rooted in the last century.

Until now, that is. A softening of hearts – or a cold recalculation of economic factors, depending on your world view – led KeSPA back into talks with Blizzard. Behind closed doors, the companies acquiesced to each other’s demands, and the Korean group agreed to start showing StarCraft II. But most importantly, they agreed to bring their star players across to the newer game. MLG Anaheim was chosen to be the venue for their unveiling, as eight of the world’s best Brood War players – Flash being one of them – were to play in a knockout tournament.





As Brood War perpetuated, StarCraft II built its own scene, and germinated its own stars. Some came from the older game, B-teamers or young players who saw their future in the sequel; others rose fresh, straight from schools and colleges and into the growing global e-sports limelight. Throughout the weekend, they mill around the Anaheim Convention Center, easy to spot with the trained eye. There’s Jang Min Chul – MC by nickname – cocky, slightly tubby, walking purposefully with arms wide. Lee Dong Nyung stands among groups of his friends looking vaguely nervy, the winner of a previous MLG Championship at only 16. They’re heroes to the 20,000 people present in the cavernous room. As the Spring Championships rage around them, they’re signing autographs, taking pictures, and having gangs of wide-eyed fans ushered away from them so they can play their allocated games. They hop between PCs, whirling centres of jetlagged motion with gruelling match schedules, getting knocked out or progressing through the ranks to the overall final on the Sunday afternoon. They’re there for business, to win an oversized cheque that’ll let them keep their team in communal food and brand new uniforms for another few months.

But when Flash steps out from the backstage curtain, past the black, metal barrier that stops fans – kids and grown men – from pressing too close to the soundproof playing booth, they all stop. Kang Dong Hyun – Symbol, famed for beating an entire team including two Global StarCraft II League champions – sits behind me. His eyes are glassy as he wriggles in his seat, trying to catch a glimpse of the KeSPA players.



Flash is one of the last out on stage. His friends from the hotel are his rivals: Korean StarCraft players who’ve made a career out of playing 1998’s Brood War expansion pack. At home, they’re all as close to household names as e-sports has yet produced. Each has a second nickname on top of their chosen one, gifted by fans and divined from their play-style. Out in the confines of the real world, these names are oddly incongruous, but in front of a monitor, they make sense. Kim Yoon Hwan’s player id is Calm; here, he looks anything but.

Announcer Clutch suggests that the braying crowd may know him as the ‘Brain Zerg’, able to coldly calculate several moves ahead of his foe. Kim Taek Yong is Bisu, or ‘the Revolutionist’, known for his unique tactics in Protoss versus Zerg matches that later filtered out to wider use. Lee Jae Dong is called Jaedong in his team, and ‘the Tyrant’ to his foes, a name earned from the Zerg player’s ruthless style. Jung Myung Hoon – Fantasy – is known as the ‘Crown Prince’.

Korean crowds, legend goes, are milder and meeker than their Western counterparts. Tournaments in the East are held at exotic locations – waterparks, beaches, and theme parks – but the fans are quieter in their appreciation. In Anaheim, a camera on a giant boom swings out across the crowd. People leap out of their seats, flailing their arms and screaming in an attempt to be noticed. One aims an exuberant punch at the device as it dangles perilously low. During Korean tournaments, fans cover their face if lit up on the roving camera’s big screen; here, the subject invariably starts dancing.



It’s a cultural difference that’s not lost on the players on stage. After the tournament, all eight are asked what the biggest difference is between Korean and Western StarCraft. All answer the same: the crowd. They’re louder, more passionate, more willing to wear their emotions on their sleeves. Later in the weekend, at a closing party in a repurposed ballroom back at my hotel, I see two male fans take things to the next level, stripping off their shirts and cavorting around in a near-naked gambit to win a spot in a 2v2 StarCraft II match alongside pro-gamers.

Back at MLG, the noise coming from the crowd increases with each player’s entrance. Figures after the event show that 20,000 people packed Anaheim Convention Centre over the Championship weekend. From my seat, it feels like most of them are arranged behind me: seated, standing, sprawling on the floor. The first player on stage – Kim Seul Ki, Soulkey – shuffles out in front of the crowd, waving politely. He’s called over to the microphone, and the cacophony quietens for a moment.

“Hello.”

The noise is redoubled. The KeSPA players quickly realise the power of their faltering English. Everything they say is greeted with a torrent of cheers. Fantasy is called up, his body jittery as he stalks the length of the sizeable stage. Grasping the mic, he calls the crowd to attention and exclaims, in breathy English, “I will dominate!”





He doesn’t, though. Seven of the eight pro-gamers on stage give way to Lee Young Ho. Flash has arrived, and the gale of applause is causing the floor to vibrate slightly. He’s visibly buoyed by the reaction of the crowd, and grabs the microphone.

“If you know me... ”

He looks up for a second, confident in his shaky English, left arm flung skywards.

“...make some NOISE!”

The roar is never louder across the weekend. The crowd starts to chant his nickname, leading to the odd phenomenon of many thousands of people chanting “FLASH!” in unison at a young Asian man.



Sports commentators in America have an excruciating word for people like Flash: ‘winningest’. It means the most successful, the biggest and the best. It’s used with a straight face, to describe coaches and quarterbacks who consistently win trophies and titles in other sports. In America, winningest feels like the greatest thing a competitor can be – above noble or brave or magnanimous. The word’s easy adoption perhaps explains why, as a country and a crowd, they take to Flash so well at MLG’s Anaheim Championship.

Among them is StarCraft II’s lead designer, Dustin Browder. Browder is broad-shouldered, with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed beard. I had interviewed him earlier in the day. There, he spoke with practised Californian confidence. Now, he’s screaming and whooping louder than most for a man who was two years old when Browder joined the industry in 1995. There’s a momentary lull in the noise as Flash speaks, and I hear Browder muttering under his breath: “Wow, that’s Flash.”

Despite his untouchable Brood War record, Flash is still a relative newbie in StarCraft II terms. He only played his first game a year ago, as other progamers perfected StarCraft II strategies honed over a year-and-ahalf of nightmarishly difficult tournament play. It doesn’t seem to matter, though. Inevitably, Flash wins his first game. He does it strangely, using an ‘all-in’ tactic: building up a small force using the income from one base and supporting it with worker units to provide a meat-shield. In StarCraft circles, it’s something of a cheap tactic, a ‘cheese’ play deployed by novice or unskilled players. There’s palpable worry in the crowd – perhaps this StarCraft superhuman is mortal after all? Has his myth been dispelled? Naturally, this isn’t the case: he resorted to the play after his keyboard stopped functioning. Playing only with the mouse – something like boxing with one arm tied behind your back in sporting analogies – he still manages to conquer his opponent.



He bludgeons his way further through the tournament, knocking Soulkey out on his way to the final, where he faces Bisu. Flash plays the Terran race in StarCraft II as he did in Brood War. Bisu is his Protoss mirror image, the player in the ascendancy for the mouthless, energy-absorbing spacemen.

Flash crushes him in straight sets. Compared with a player like DongRaeGu – MLG Anaheim’s eventual Spring Championship winner – Flash’s play isn’t pretty: he banks too many resources, he takes needless losses. But in three consecutive best-of-three matches, he’s beaten the world’s most successful pro-gamers without losing a game Then, in his soundproof booth, he packages up his keyboard and mouse. Through the perspex screen, I can see the same toothy smile I spotted in the hotel lobby.

Everything here is new for Lee Young Ho: a new game – StarCraft II is an ongoing concern for Blizzard, updated with constant patches, balance tweaks, and the shadow of expansion packs, where Brood War was left to fester for years; a new world – the West has enthusiastically embraced e-sports in the last two years, a charge led by StarCraft II; and a new crowd.

I spot Lee Young Ho back at the Anaheim Hilton hotel after the tournament. Were he a football player, he’d be hidden from view and flanked by security. Here, he’s back with his friends, sat on a plush sofa in the lobby – visibly exhausted, but flashing that same smile. Further out, MLG attendees snatch glances at their StarCraft idol, leagues above in skill, metres away in person. All eyes in the room are on Flash.

Two years ago, Colin Northway - the extravagantly-bearded, globetrotting creator of Incredipede - sold everything he owned except for a backpack, some clothes and a laptop, and got on a plane with his wife and a plan: to travel the world making indie games.

Since then, he's been to Turkey, Czech Republic, Italy, Malta, Scotland, Paris, British Columbia Canada, Honduras, Costa Rica, BC (again), Tokyo, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Greece, Scotland (again), and France.

I caught up with Northway to ask about the inspiration for creature-constructing puzzle-game Incredipede, how travelling helps him make better games, and how to stay productive while working within a stone's throw of a tropical beach. You can read more about the game in our Incredipede preview, vote for it on Incredipede's Steam Greenlight page, and even pre-order it at Incredipede.com.

Hello Colin, where on the planet are you right now, and where are you going next?

I am in Vienna, Austria, staying with a friend who is part of the indie studio Broken Rules. They made And Yet it Moves and are working on Chasing Aurora. His cats are chasing each other around the room knocking over his young son's toys and books.

From here we will fly to Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada. My wife Sarah and I both grew up in British Columbia and like to spend a few months in the summer there. In the summer it is the most beautiful place in the world. We'll go to PAX and to Orcajam, a game jam held every year on the island.



You're about to release Incredipede. Tell us a little about it.

Incredipede is a game about life and feet. All animals are made with bones and muscles. Just bones and muscles can create a huge variety of movement and a huge variety of creatures. Incredipede takes the vast creativity of the natural world and gives it to you to play with. It lets you get your hands sticky with the raw wet strings of life.

From a more mechanical, game-design point of view Incredipede gives you a simple, small tool-set and challenges you to overcome various obstacles. What's the perfect creature to push over a tree? Or scamper across lava? Or climb a cliff? Or swing through the canopy? First you design the creature out of bones and muscles then you control her as she overcomes whatever obstacle she's been dealt.

Where did the inspiration for the game come from?

The idea could only have come from the jungle. Sarah and I lived in Honduras for two months in a house slung out over the water at the end of a terrible dirt road. We were surrounded (and occasionally invaded) by the natural world and creatures of all sorts. Fish swam underneath us as hummingbirds visited our balcony, baby boa constrictors and land crabs crawled through the yard, and ants invaded our kitchen. Not to mention the lizards and manta-rays and cuttlefish.

It's impossible not to marvel at the ingenuity of life and with so much of it around Incredipede was inevitable. To give myself (and other people) the chance to play in that world was fantastically enticing. I actually credit this lizard with the game idea.



What is it about travelling that informs your game ideas?

When you're traveling you're always being confronted with new ideas and all art is made of new ideas. Novel input, novel output.

But in game design there are lots of problems to solve. One of the most important for Incredipede is the controls. How do players actually build creatures? What do they click on? Incredipede is very original and I had to design the interface from scratch. Tokyo was the perfect place for this. You don't want to base your interface design on a jungle, jungles are confusing places. Tokyo on the other hand is meticulously designed for human use.

Tokyo has a great subway system but it's very complicated. There are a lot of lines. But one line, the Yamanote line, is a simple ring around the city. Instead of spending forever studying maps and optimising paths we just took the Yamanote line. It got everywhere eventually.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in Incredipede was how you build muscles. At first you could put a muscle anywhere and it felt like this gave you a lot of freedom. But sometimes freedom is free doom. In this game there are really only two options for each muscle. Either the muscle pushes the limb left or it pushes it right. Now when you build a muscle you choose between these two options instead of a world of possibilities that are all identical. Which is just like we use the Tokyo subway system.

The plot of the game is inspired by the differences in wealth we've seen around the world. The labor history of Scotland was really inspiring (my family is from Scotland). It's easy to forget that those huge castles everyone loves represent a gross imbalance of wealth between the few lords and their teeming subjects. I hope the game manages to echo a little bit of the bravery and effort of the struggle to overturn that imbalance.



It must be tough to make games while travelling around. Do you find yourself getting distracted by your surroundings?

Spending more time in a place is the key to being productive. If you only spend a week or two in any one place you end up being incredibly distracted the whole time because there's this big exciting new place outside! Given a few months you can pace yourself and get into a rhythm. Sometimes you can even be more productive while traveling.

If you rent apartments/houses by the month you can get good rates and in some countries you can get great rates. Our house in Greece cost a third of what our San Francisco apartment had cost us. As long as you don't criss-cross too many oceans during the year you can keep airfares under control. We're not rich, we just have itchy feet.

What are the best places to work?

Abandoned stretches of coastline. Hands down. We get a lot more work done in Costa Rica or Thailand than in Vancouver or Istanbul. Big cities are filled with distractions. Especially if you have good friends there. If you live beside a beach in the middle of nowhere there isn't much to do but go for long thoughtful walks and write code. If you can walk out your front door and spend a few hours surfing or snorkeling you'll be calm and focused for the rest of the day.

It's surprising that the places we get the most work done are also the most beautiful and also the cheapest but it's true.

Do you ever have trouble getting power and internet access?

Mobile phones have changed the world. The way they've changed the world for your average European or Canadian is nothing compared to how they've changed poorer tropical countries where there were no landlines.

Small cities in the tropics bristle with cellphone towers and every one of them is radiating a decent, affordable, 3G connection. You aren't going to be streaming Youtube or getting headshots in Counter-Strike but you can slurp the knowledge you need and stay in communication with team-mates and the world.

Power is often flaky but provides a good excuse to go outside and do something fun.



There are indie developers dotted all around the world, have you ever visited them?

We like to meet other independent game authors while we travel. Istanbul has a really friendly indie community who invited us in. We had a blast with them and attended the first ever Istanbul Game Jam. We sung karaoke in Tokyo with Indies and even attended an indie rice tasting with an indie gamer. We've also met indies in France, Athens, and Hong Kong. They're all great people and having a local connection makes travel ten times more fun.

Have you ever managed to persuade anyone to join you on your travels?

We're always trying to convince our friends to come with us. Ron Carmel (World of Goo) and his wife Arlie came with us for two months to the Philippines. We've also shared the road with Nathan Vella (Capybara games), Mike Boxleiter (Solipskier, Fig. 8), Aaron Isaksen (AppAbove games), Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure) and the Broken Rules guys (And Yet it Moves, Chasing Aurora).

I think we've planted a seed. People really like it when they try it. Selling all your stuff and ditching your apartment feels like a big step and people are hesitant to do it. But as we prove it can work and people start to get a taste for it I hope we'll have more companions drifting around the earth writing games with us.

If I had Minecraft money I would buy a sunny little island somewhere and dedicate it to the production and the producers of games. People would come and spend a few months being inspired by nature and by the other people there. We would all be artists in residence in paradise. I think a lot of really good games would come out of a place like that, and we're always looking for the perfect island.

This article originally appeared in issue 244 of PC Gamer UK.

I know he’s behind me. I can’t hear him; the only sound is that of my hurried footsteps on the dry grass. I can’t see him; my flashlight only circles the endless rows of trees in front of me. But I can feel him. Watching. Waiting for me to turn around.

These are his woods after all, and I’ve just arrived at a dead end. Slowly, I turn... and there he is, with his awful empty face, and static buzzing in my ears. The game ends, and I collapse back into my chair, my heart doing triplets.

The premise behind free-to-play Slender is utterly simple. You’re stuck in the woods equipped with only a dying flashlight and the ability to sprint in short bursts. You must collect eight randomly scattered notes and crucially, vitally, you must avoid Slender and his cold, reaching fingers.

The Slender Man was born on a SomethingAwful thread that challenged forumites to create paranormal images using Photoshop. One Victor Surge posted two photographs of children in a playground, with an unusually long-limbed, well-dressed man standing in the background. He had no face. Now, after starring in several ARGs, and even in Minecraft as the Endermen, Slender has found a new way to come after you.



It’s astonishing that a basic game can ignite such a primal sense of fear, especially when the graphics are, well, a bit crappy. Yet within minutes of playing, my palms were damp, my skin was crawling with goosebumps, and I had to spam the Esc key until I was staring at the safe, fluffy kittens on my desktop again.

The game knows exactly how to toy with you. Slender’s skinny frame is difficult to distinguish from the trees, making you skittish as you peer into the shadows. You never see him moving – he’s just standing there, slowly getting closer. It doesn’t help that the disjointed music gradually builds up, grating the nerves – and a shrill orchestral stab screeches out should he appear. This is horror at its finest.

The wood itself is a surprisingly small area. But because your light source is so limited, and your walking speed so goddamn slow, you feel as if you’re trapped in an infinite landscape littered with odd, faintly unsettling architecture. Abandoned trucks, rusted storage tanks, a gnarled tree straight from the set of Poltergeist... and that nasty angular building full of tight corners and dead ends – perfect for getting trapped in.

Worse of all, all these landmarks force you to turn around in order to find those precious pages. And as your note count gets higher, the Slender Man gets nearer. You will panic. You will run. But don’t turn around, boys and girls. He’ll be there. And then you’ll be his.

This is a 4X strategy game – which sounds a bit like a punch-up fuelled by crappy beer. In fact, the four ‘X’s stand for the classic principles that underpin this particular offshoot of the genre: explore, exploit, expand, and everyone’s favourite – exterminate!

Endless Space focuses on macro-management rather than down-and-dirty detail-fiddling. It makes galactic control streamlined, helped enormously by the slickest interface this type of game has ever seen, a beautifully designed UI that keeps things only one or two clicks away.

It feels good just to fiddle with. The overall focus of your empire, from what direction the tech is moving to what each system is producing, is all present on the main galaxy view, so a quick glance at the beginning of each turn tells you where everything stands. It’s a great achievement, even though there are inevitably one or two things nested away in counter-intuitive places: unlocking ship designs, for example, only unlocks the hull, which you have to incorporate into a custom build before production.



The feel of the game flows from this uncluttered interface. Playing as one of eight races (or building your own by pick-and-mixing attributes), the choices are good old-fashioned warfare, an economic victory, a scientific victory, an expansion victory or the rather odd ‘Supremacy’ victory of taking over the other races’ homeworlds. Bit unappetising, that last one.

The mechanics are always the same: fly colonies to other star systems, exploit them, develop tech, and deal with other players. It’s the resources that make the difference: science for tech, food for population, industry for production, and the magical currency of Dust. Strategic resources are sprinkled around that you can’t detect without a bit of teching, and these are crucial to certain playstyles. Military types, for example, want Titanium-70 for construction of their battlefleets.

After a few games, you realise the most important thing is... everything. Tiny advantages can become the pivot on which the fate of empires turn, and wasted production cycles never come back. The AI varies: the military and expansion-focused races are by far the best singleplayer thopponents; races intended for diplomacy or teching victories don’t work so well, just asking for free resources and trying to form alliances willy-nilly.



Those more subtle wins aren’t unattainable, it’s just that the AI feels too clumsy to carry them off. In multiplayer it’s different, although there games take so long that many matches end up abandoned by all but the early leader.

The one thing I didn’t like is the combat: a rock-papers-scissors series of choices followed by a cutscene result. The unskippable videos are beautiful the first couple of times, but rapidly pall. Your only option in the late-game is to set battling to automatic rather than manual, or sit through 20 in a row.

Nevertheless, this has the foundations of a great game, and judging by the devs’ willingness to incorporate community suggestions, it will get even better. If you’re all about space battles, it doesn’t quite deliver. But anyone who’s a fan of backroom deals, the exploitation of natural resources, and the crushing of all who defy you, will find Endless Space is their kind of universe.