It's difficult to wrap your head around how large the universe is. It's one thing to say that the distance from the here to the moon is ten times the circumference of the Earth, but that figure is incomprehensible. It's hard enough to wrap our tiny minds around the notion that our planet, our home, is finite, much less the preposterous distances between the stars. Galactic Civilizations III understands and fluently wields those disparate perspectives--the mundane and human as well as the astronomical--to craft a game that manages to bring the tiniest shuttlecraft, the mightiest quasar, and all the distant mysteries that lie between into a single coherent vision.

As you might suspect from the name, Galactic Civilizations is a game that, while inspired by Sid Meier's seminal masterpiece, games are expected to have a lot of bugs because they are so open, Galactic Civilizations has a lot of rough edges. I played a final build of the game, and there were still some missing textures, odd graphical glitches, poorly edited music, and one missing technology description. They were all cosmetic, but they were common enough to be distracting.

The bigger problems come from how unrefined some of the ancillary features are. One of the biggest additions is the ideology system. As you make choices about how the shape of your civilization progresses, you'll build up points in Benevolence, Pragmatism, or Malevolence. This is intended to be a morality system, but in practice, its effects are loose and intangible. Picking a new step on one of the three trees will usually grant you a one-time bonus, but they aren't substantial, and they don't represent play style. In my second game, I was ruthless and declared war on everyone, but I was able to maintain a façade of altruism by picking certain dialogue options. As a method of embodying the kind of civilization you want to be, the Ideology system doesn't work.

Taken as a whole, Galactic Civilization's failings are minor. For most games, a few major pieces that don’t quite fit together would be a death knell. Galactic Civilizations keeps its focus right where it needs to--on excellent fundamentals. Progressive pacing makes the enormity of space amenable and paradoxically personal, while the sheer number and variety of tools and options at your disposal allow you to succeed and win if you can out-think everyone else.