Twilight of the Arnor is the second and final expansion to the acclaimed Galactic Civilizations 2, now known as one of the best in the 4X genre. Galactic Civilizations 2 was already an extremely engaging and immersive experience, offering a great campaign with a complete story involving multiple races, and the typical game mode of the genre, where you start with nothing in a huge galaxy and try to conquer it. Twilight of the Arnor improves the game on many, if not every aspects, it feels like the developers actually read reviews of the original game, and worked on all flaws that were pointed out. The result is the creation of an ever better game.

STORY
First, the story. Normally, 4X games aren’t really well known for having good stories. Think of Civilization IV, the closest thing you get to a campaign mode are pre-prepared games that throws you in the real universe with some basic objectives. In Gal Civ 2, there’s really a story. Twilight of the Arnor is obviously concluding what was started in the original game and the Dread Lords expansion.

To sum it up, two apparent evil races, the Drengins and the Koraths are ravaging the galaxy, annihilating the other races they meet. The Korath made an alliance with a force known as the Dread Lords, some ultra-powerful being that were freed from a pocket universe by the Drengin. Eventually, the Drengin turned away from they destruction-bent cousins, and tried to stop them, but to no avail, bringing a civil war to the galaxy.

The Terrans, to ensure their survival, used an ancient artifact from another ancient race with the same origins of the Dread Lords, the Arnor, and isolated the Earth with a impenetrable force field, and used a second artifact to send their main fleet into the pocket space that kept the Dread Lords at bay for so long. . In the campaign, the game puts in your hands the fate of a group of Humans back from unexplored space after a long mission. It’s up to you to save the galaxy with some newly acquired knowledge from the last Arnorian. Even if generally you don’t play this game for the story, I think it’s worth a shot, because it’s well told and surprisingly good.

GRAPHICS
This used to be one of the major “flaws” of this game. Graphics really weren’t awesome, but they did the job. Planets and ships had ok textures, nothing more. Twilight of the Arnor tries to improve this side of the game, and does it well. Ships are more detailed, so are planets, and special effects. There’s not a lot to say, except that everything is better, and when I say everything, it’s literally everything.

Also, the memory leak is now fixed. So even with better graphics, and bigger games, the game is faster, and works better. On a low end computer, you’ll really, really notice the difference.

There’s one minor complaint that I have, sometimes when certain ships are on the screen, the frame rate will get choppy. It happened to me a few times in the campaign, but never in a regular game. I haven’t been able to reproduce that problem on purpose after some testing, but anyway it rarely happened. Knowing how Stardock supports their game, they’ll fix this quickly. All the improvements are impressive; it’s just so much better.

SOUND
Again, not much to say. There’s basically no voice acting. The sound effects are used properly, nothing really standing out, which is neither good nor bad. The music as always is great, and there are also more songs than before. It also is used well, for example, if you turned your civilization into an evil one, the music will change for something more fitting. It helps a lot creating a creepy, “space ambiance” in the game. I don’t know how to describe it, “creepy” seems like the only fitting word. And that’s a positive thing.

CONTROLS
Not much change from the previous games, except again, some minor improvements. The interface is more or less the same, with some added features. For beginners, the interface might be a bit confusing and convoluted, but once you’re used to it, you understand how much it’s well done. No complaints here, all the tweaks are welcome, especially all the finance management screens. It really helps manipulating your civilization in a better way. Again, everything is improved.

GAMEPLAY
Now on to the important part. Before starting a game, you choose some settings for the galaxy. In this expansion, a new galaxy size is available, which is simply monstrous. Its way bigger than the biggest we had before. Also, with the memory leak fixed like I pointed out before, the biggest galaxy actually uses less memory than the biggest size did in the previous expansion pack. You can also disable certain victory conditions as always, including the newly added one, the ascension victory. To win this way, you have to build starbases around some “ascensions crystals” in the galaxy and hold them for a while. It adds an interesting dynamic to the game, but I didn’t like it that much.

The other settings are unchanged, so you chose are common stars, habitable planets, asteroid fields, anomalies are, how many minor races there is. Twilight of the Arnor doesn’t add any new races to the game though, but the modified tech trees make up for it. Now there’s a real incentive in not playing with the Terrans. There are still some common techs, that all races have, but there’s now a bunch of exclusive ones, that really help in the specialization and uniqueness of every races. This is one of the biggest additions in the expansion, and it works very well, adding a real point to tech trading. And with unique techs, come unique planetary improvements, which again add a whole new layer of depth to the game. Also, creating your own civilization is now even better, since you can create your own tech tree with the available editors.

Otherwise, the gameplay itself is similar, with minor tweaks. For example, colony ships and freighter are now faster, allowing for faster starts in the game. There’s also an option that makes it possible to automatically upgrade basic ship designs when you learn new technologies. That’s very useful, seriously. Another neat thing, the Terror Stars are back. Basically, think Death Star from Star Wars. They’re huge, they take forever to build, they’re defenseless alone, but they blow up star systems and everything in it. Lot’s of fun to be had.

Apparently the AI is improved in multiple ways, although I have yet to see the real difference with this. Tech trading is harder though, I’ll give them that. You can’t just get anything from them, and they generally won’t trade important military techs with you unless they’re in love or something. The ship designer is modified to work more efficiently too. They added some new parts and components that go with the new techs, and you can even add some animated parts. But honestly, I preferred the way the designer was organized before, I’m not a huge fan of the new design of the ship designer, but I can understand why people like it.

To conclude, I can only say that Twilight of the Arnor is everything you ever wanted from an expansion pack. Every flaw from the original game and the first expansion were worked on, and the result is an almost perfect game with virtually infinite replay value. I would proclaim Galactic Civilizations 2 to be the most complete and the best game of its genre… ever.

If you’re a Galactic Civilizations fan, or a fan of the 4X turn based strategy genre, this is a must buy.

Score

A-