The Terran Alliance defeated the Dread Lords, but the conflict left its forces in such a weakened state that the evil Drengin Empire swooped in and took over. In Dark Avatar, the new expansion to Galactic Civilizations II, players take on the role of the bad guys. In actuality, the Drengin don't ask for much. They just want to expand their empire, meet exotic alien creatures and enslave them. Unfortunately, things start to go wrong in the evil empire. The Dengin's main support comes from slave labor. Without it, the empire starts to crumble.
Dark Avatar's campaign continues Dread Lords' story with an interesting narrative written from a new perspective. A few more movie sequences and less reading would make it better, but it provides good entertainment. The meat of the game still lays in its open-ended mode where players explore, expand and conquer the galaxy. Each race now includes super abilities, such as boosted trade skills or espionage. These abilities provide significant strategic boosts for any race, and may compensate for weaknesses in a custom race.
New races complement these features. In the past, the great spy game consisted of little more than allocating funds. Now players train spies and not only assign them to specific planets, but specific buildings. Furthermore, spies nullify infiltration, although doing so sacrifices the unit. Giving up a spy shouldn't be a decision taken lightly, since every successive spy takes more turns to train than the last. Agents quickly become an expensive commodity. Tossing spies into a building will shut down the facility. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any setting for passive spying. Although the diplomacy screen received an upgrade to propose trade treaties, it fails to include a way to demand rival factions to cease their espionage efforts. In fact, much like the espionage option, trade treaties offer great ways to strengthen an empire's infrastructure. Once players establish a trade agreement, they cannot break it until two factions go to war.
Dark Avatar still suffers from a few minor issues present in the original game, like non-allied aliens setting up colonies inside a rival faction's solar system without fear of repercussions. However, the positives far outweigh the negatives. The original game also suffers from too few planets, even when the "plentiful" setting turned on. Now, each race has atmospheric preferences, so what one race may regard as hostile, another may think of as paradise. Players discover terraforming and hostile habitat technologies from GalCiv's gigantic research tree. However, getting to them may require a great deal of time, even after they set research to maximum speed.
Dark Avatar offers great new game play options to an already impressive strategy game. When dealing with games like Galactic Civilizations II, which seem to have it all, the fact that this expansion still offers some significant improvements without making things too complicated, makes it worth a look.
Final Score: 8 (out of 10)
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