The graphics and effects for units and weapons fire is excellent. The engine also efficiently handles a lot of action at once with fighters and bullets flying everywhere. The developers should be commended. Where the graphics looses points, though, is in the background. Surely something more than a rather flat-looking 2D bitmap could have been used without sacrificing speed too much. A few points are gained, though, with the detail in watching your ships and structures be constructed.

The in-game sound effects are good, as are the voice-overs. The cinematic and briefing voice-overs are great, and the music is phenomenal. Each species has its own music. The Terrans feature a great selection of spacy military music, the Mantis feature something that could only best be described to Trekkies as Klingon-like music, and the Celerion music reminds me quite a bit of the music from Blade Runner. I could listen to the tracks all day long, and it certainly makes the time spent waiting for a fleet of heavy ships to build a lot more exciting.

Quite simply, it's the best RTS gameplay I've seen, at least since Total Annihilation, and possibly ever. There's something about the thrill of waging multiple battles across multiple maps at once that brings the RTS genre not only out of 2D graphics, but out of 2D gameplay as well. The strategic control of planets truly makes for an interesting switch to the way bases are built as well.

The story is great, but not exceptionally deep, and the gameplay is fairly straight forward. The strategy and tactics employed, though, are nearly limitless, with the addition of multiple maps, you can drive yourself crazy fairly quickly trying to come up with that "win-all" strategy.

Truly a great multiplayer game, provided you have an extremely long time to sit and face an opponent across multiple star systems. The addition of admirals to command your fleets truly makes multiplayer a different experience from every other game, as though playing on multiple maps at once didn't do that already. The unfortunate side of multiplayer is dealing with the well run, but somewhat clumsy Ubi Soft Gaming Service. The browser seems to have tried to clone MPlayer and a hint of Zone, both of which are quite distressing to use. Unfortunately, there are few work-arounds for clumsy gaming services at the moment, so in terms of servers, GS4 is proving more than adequate for the moment.