Regardless of genre, style, or even critical acclaim, when I hear about a game that’s as old as I am hitting Steam for the first time, I’m beyond intrigued. That’s exactly what’s just happened with Emperor of the Fading Suns, a 4X game that sees five royal houses jostle for control. Not over a fantasy kingdom, mind you. Not even a single planet. This battle for supremacy occurs in a distant future across a galactic realm of dozens of planets. Incredibly ambitious for its time, the Enhanced Edition of the game is now available on Steam all these years later.
In Emperor of the Fading Suns, you pick one of the five main royal houses to align with and you’re sworn in as their leader. Each house has different connections, loyalties, and specialities, with some controlling more planets than others at the start of a game. You could choose an almighty and powerful faction, or an emerging and rebellious one looking to shift the balance. After choosing which house to side with in this 4X game, you then pick a few traits that you can lean into throughout your playthrough. There’s also a list of negative traits which will hinder you in some aspects, such as trading or your starting relationship with certain entities, but picking one of these will award you with an extra point to spend on a positive trait. Outside of the five houses, you must also work with or against forces like The Church or even alien races.
You’ll start out your journey on your faction’s home planet. Some are perfectly habitable, Earth-like worlds which will give you an initial advantage. Others are more hostile, such as ice planets, but they may hold their own unique benefits that you can tap into. As you chart a course across this space empire, dubbed the Known Realms, you’ll arrive on new planets which each have their own unique, hex-tile maps. Use your diplomatic skills and relationships, or engage in land, sea, and air battles, to conquer them and expand your influence.
As well as playing through the single-player campaign with the standard galactic layout developer Holistic Design implemented, there’s also a world editor that lets you create your own systems of planets and make custom world maps too. On top of this, it supports multiplayer of up to five people, so you can either work together to conquer the galaxy under one banner or get competitive and pick rivaling houses.
The Enhanced Edition of this incredibly in-depth 4X keeps the visual style of the original game but updates things to look crisper on modern systems. There are also plenty of gameplay improvements and modernizations versus the 1997 release.
Emperor of the Fading Suns Enhanced Edition is out now on Steam, and it’ll set you back just $9.99 / £8.50. To add it to your library, or learn more about it, head to its store page here.
If this isn’t quite the experience you’re after, you may find something more to your taste over on our lists of the best strategy games. Or, if you want to check out more classics that you can play right now, head to our best old PC games guide.
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