Stellaris Console Edition – Xbox One Review

Stellaris Review

Stellaris is a space 4x Grand strategy game Developed by Paradox Interactive. A company that boasts a large portfolio of successful grand strategy games, Stellaris on PC is no exception of this. The question is, how well has the Grand Strategy experience transitioned over to a new platform with Stellaris Console Edition?

What is Stellaris?

Before starting on your very own galactic story, you will be given the task of setting the foundation. You can either select a pre-made race, each with their own unique traits and personalities, or you can create your own.

The empire customization is brilliant, You can set the characteristics. From Xenophiles to Xenophobes or Pacifists to war raving lunatics – There is so much variety to consider. You can create the capital world, sector and even fleet designs. You truly hold the key to creating a race that will decide how the game will be played.

Stellaris Console Edition

Early on, the aim of the game is to expand as quickly as possible whilst making sure that you are building a sustainable empire. At the same time researching technologies and traditions that will aid with your desired playstyle.

Eventually your colonising and expanding will slow down significantly as you encounter other alien races. These foreign empires can be treated as friends or foe.

Over the duration of the game, you will either befriend significant powers, wage enough wars that you yourself become a significant power or mind your own business and hope that the rest of the galaxy don’t take an interest in your sectors.

You will encounter many issues along the way, tackling criminals or negotiating with them to ensure the planets stability remains intact. Working the market to trade your excess stock and in return gain a resource valuable to you.

Whatever your approach may be. if you live long enough you will become familiar with the fallen empire. A fallen empire is like any other, only much much much more powerful. Luckily as long as you don’t annoy them, They generally keep themselves to themselves throughout the duration of a game. Though eventually during your game, They will kick into life and rain havoc down on the surviving empires.

The fallen empire is a fantastic endgame. Because although they possess an incredible amount of power, Completely out of reach from your own capabilities, they are still beatable. Based entirely on political decision-making and utilising choke points within the galaxy to do maximum damage.

Is Stellaris Console Edition Playable?

Grand strategy games and Console gaming don’t generally go hand in hand and with good reason, A big part of grand strategy games is micromanaging multiple things and a controller’s limitations usually make this very difficult to do.

Paradox did a fantastic job of working around problems caused by not having access to mouse and keyboard. The D-Pad playing a big part in the game. In addition to this, the majority of the game can be played from the galaxy screen. using nothing more than the games UI and notifications to keep tabs of everything.

one thing to note, Stellaris console edition runs off of an outdated variant of Stellaris, resulting in the game having numerous occasions where nothing is actually happening. You are just sat around waiting in between events for something else to kick off.

In addition to this the AI can be pretty suspect at times. On numerous occasions my federation would wage war on a small empire, only to just sit around not doing much. This would result in, despite the mismatch of power, me having to trek half way across the galaxy to do what my federation should easily have done.

If you are a PC gamer wondering about the console game being worth getting, I would say give it a miss as the PC version has so much more on offer. On the other hand, if you are someone yet to play a grand strategy game or even Stellaris for that matter. Then I couldn’t recommend this game enough.

Stellaris can result in a huge strain on the best of CPU’s. The Xbox handled this burden well. I don’t recall ever having any game slowdowns or freezing throughout my time playing. Even when there was a lot happening on screen.

Stellaris is a good example that grand strategy games are doable on consoles. Although it isn’t perfect, it is most certainly playable. What you get with Stellaris Console Edition is a slightly dumbed-down version of what is offered on PC.

Other Grand Strategy Games you may be interested in –

Civilization: Frontier Pass

Europa Universalis IV: Emperor

Amazon Link to buy –

Avid sports gamer whos love of the genre dates back to his very first football match, Where he loved competing but hated putting in any actual effort. Thus a compromise was met. Also loves to talk about himself in the third person to make himself seem more important than he is.

4 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*

Lost Password