The base experience is a 4x strategy game. Shadow Empire is the Alpha Centauri of today, only better. Shadow Empire could have been made in 1996, but instead we get it now, in 2020, when games of its calibre and this vision are few and far between. You’ll still fondly think of the time you spent trying to figure out where bureaucratic points came from and why the Freemen never performed as well in combat as they seemed to in Dune. Cults, Corporations, 6 foot carnivorous Crab Analogs. Detailed interpersonal and interstate relations played out through dialogue boxes and relation scores.
Stars and the dunes of a desert planet are the only visual accompanying the install. You pop it into your parent’s Windows 98’s disk drive. The vague words ‘Shadow Empire’ stare up at you in scrawled sharpie from the front of a bootleg CD. Shadow Empire, the latest 4x wargame from Slitherine/Matrix, tries to evoke both the hard sci-fi of the novels of the 1980s-90s and the feeling of playing a wargame circa 1996. Imagine if you will: Others try to feel like a grand drama, pulling on Hollywood or epic novels to create an atmosphere that entangles you in the experience. Some try to recreate the harsh reality of battlefield command through spartan visuals and dense menus, evoking a sense of determined seriousness. Some games try to capture a certain feeling through their gameplay and presentation.
