There has been a steady stream of 4X games in the last year, and it takes a certain type of person to indulge in this particular genre. Coincidentally most of these titles are set in space, which seems like the best environment to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate ad nauseam. Legends of Pegasus is the latest 4X title to hit the digital store shelves, brought to us by a new team from Germany called Novacore Studios. On the surface it looks to have everything you would need in a strategy game of this nature (spaceships, colonization modules, and particle beams) but it ends up being a mish mash of ideas stripped from previous games. Riddled by bugs, Legends of Pegasus is a shell of a game that does nothing for the genre and requires little of you attention.
I have to give credit to Novacore Studios for attempting to add a storyline to the experience. There is a reason why 4X strategy games don’t have storied campaigns, as it is very difficult to corral players into a story while still giving them the freedom to explore the galaxy. Legends of Pegasus takes a page out of my favorite show, Battlestar Galactica, and has you commanding the remnants of the human race who were driven from Earth after a surprise alien attack. In search of survival, you command a small fleet that must assemble the pieces back together through colonization, technology research, and of course fight off the imminent alien force that is threatening your very existence. The story is given to you though talking portraits in game and when you hit certain milestones, you are treated to a motion comic that elaborates on the current events. There are three playable races: the survivalist humans, the insectoid Anthrox, and the cybernetic X’or, each with their own four episodes. There are predictable plot twists and unimagined characters making the overall story experience lackluster, proving again that 4X games don’t need a plot.
The story is told through a series of stills with spoken dialog.
The Human campaign serves as the tutorial which is uninformative at best. You’re presented with text popups that do little to teach you the game, and the mission descriptions sound something like this, “Expand your fleet.”. The Achilles heel of 4X games is that they are complex, so learning the systems is of utmost importance. A simple objective of eliminating an enemy threat is frustrating when the game expects you to know how to manage your economy. If you complete an objective before you are given that actual mission, you will have to start from scratch and begin from step one. What it comes down to is that the tutorial is terribly designed and does nothing but waste your time instead of teaching you how to play the game.