I loooooove 4x games, make it a Space Empire 4x and I'm in heaven, so I purchased it. It's ok, not great, but not bad. Two of the things it claims to be the "decendant" of is MOO and Homeworld. If anyone has the gall to tell you that in person: kick'um in the nuts, it's a lie. It is an RTS game (and I hate RTS games), but you can vary the speed and at normal speed things don't move to fast, so that's not that big of a deal. As Smash mentions the Tech tree isn't anything to crow about and combat is strictly two dimensional and... uh, two dimensional. Ships will use the Z plane to get out of each others way, but there is no advantage or point to it otherwise and, as he said, it's strictly rock, paper scissors. On the otherhand the game is easy to learn (no MOO3, here), the graphics are pretty and, uh I can't think of a third thing to make it good.
My opinion? Go pick up "Sword of the Stars" or "Galactic Civilizations II" for $20 and wait til "Sins" drops to $20, in six months to a year, before picking it up.
Edited, Mar 11th 2008 10:05pm by GitSlayer