I was honestly not entirely sure what to expect when I first started up this browser-based bit free-to-play science fiction interactivity. The initial Kabam website login did not give me any information other than the name of the game itself, so the only thing I knew at first was the name of the game.
Getting Started
Making a free Kabam account was easy enough, and the game itself gives a brief but sufficient explanation of the three available factions and their ideologies. Each faction has three races, though the differences between the factions and races appear to be entirely cosmetic. The variety is still pretty nice, if a bit cliché.
The actual tutorial is simple, but at first seems to give surprisingly little information about the combat.
Do not be alarmed.
This is not because the tutorial is insufficient, it is because the combat really is that simple. Immediately after the brief battle, the tutorial guides me to my starbase, and it grants our first hints at what the core mechanic of the game is. Time.
The starbase starts off very simple. It has extremely limited capability and no defenses. Upgrading and adding to it costs various amounts of four different resources and takes time to build. This tutorial very helpfully points out that you can speed up the process, and this speeding-up is free for anything taking less than five minutes!
This bit of cleverness is obviously to get the player used to being able to hurry things along. The early upgrades are quick enough, but it does not take long before module upgrades and ship refits take half an hour or more, requiring players to either sit and wait patiently or spend the game’s cash currency. Cash currency the game does give a little bit of in order to give a taste of what it can do.
More of the Same
The game follows much the same formula from this point on. Players form trade routes to get resources over time, but can only store a certain amount of them, requiring regular logins to make use of them. Times on steadily more and more advanced items grow higher and higher, giving the player lots of time to engage in effectively identical battles with NPCs or other players.
The only way to speed this process up is to pay real-world money, as one would expect from a free-to-play game. The cash currency can be used to do almost anything in the game aside from fight the combat. It can be used to rush projects, to acquire the resources needed to start one, or to search destroyed wrecks for a bit extra, including blueprints to more advanced technologies.
This does not make the game un-fun.
It does cause the player to constantly be reminded that they can spend real money on the game, but the game itself is still reasonably entertaining. The combat is simple, but diverting enough, while the graphics are actually pretty good for being browser-based.
The main issue the game has is the lack of a real goal. You can develop and grow and expand to better be able to… develop and grow and expand. There very well may be a highly-interesting endgame with a few genuine titans commanding virtually unstoppable fleets from indomitable space-fortresses, but for the most part it seems to be a lot of people wandering about semi-idly attacking NPCs and each other.
The PvP side of things slows the development overall, as there is always someone (so far as I am aware) who is capable of smashing your base to pieces, setting you back painfully far.
There are a few bugs in the game, as well. Most notably, any time I would try to build something on my starbase, if I tried to move the camera to get a better view of where I wanted to place it, the game would become entirely unresponsive, requiring a refresh of the page. This does not cost anything but a few seconds of time, but it is still a mildly frustrating exercise.
All in all, Imperium Galactic War makes for a pleasant distraction.
It definitely seems more of an economy manager set in a sci-fi persistent universe than an actual sci-fi adventure, but that is not as damning as it could be. I wish it had some depth aside from its pleasant appearance, but there is certainly worse out there.
