Hah, so here's an interesting take on it. Saw this pop up in my feed, one guy has some thematic issues with the game:
http://www.pastemagazine.com/articl...on-beyond-earth-reviewthe-mistakes-of-ma.html
I don't know. It is, ultimately, a civilization game. To complain that Beyond Earth is hollow because it contains the standard 4x gameplay mechanics of a 4x strategy game seems somewhat pointless. I also think it's telling that the author didn't give any suggestions of what the gameplay should contain.
It's nice and all to think that a futuristic game isn't forward-thinking enough but I don't know what he expected. This mostly comes across as "this isn't different enough for me even though I don't know what I want it to be." There's nothing to suggest that the future isn't going to be filled with aggressive, dominating colonization any more than we'll reach some weird Zen bliss and mutuality where we descended from our spaceships like some weird communism deities here to spread the good word of equitable communalism. The whole point of the affinity mechanic appears to be the representation of a clash of ideals and how the different factions handle that clash.
I mean, if you're Harmony and all you want to do is sing kumbaya with bull ants, what are you going to do when a Purity faction comes through to murder your beloved alien nests and clean up their eco-system in order to plant a whole bunch of invasive Earth species?
It would be nice to see a game with a robust diplomacy system but at no point can you really ignore the option that people are likely to solve their problems with bullets. Plus, it's a base release. Every version of Civ is kind of "bare bones" on launch. The article even mentions that Civ V didn't become truly complex until its two expansions.
