Horizon Review

Horizon is a new Space 4X strategy game. It was made by newcomers L30, and is published by current Space-4x champions Iceberg interactive. It favours management and tactics over action and visuals, and has everything from detailed colony management, to a turn-base tactical combat engine that’s based on positioning, facing and the micro-management of your forces. On paper, it sounds lovely, but in reality it leaves much to be desired. It’s a tale that’s becoming all too familiar, sadly. A well-meaning indie-studio, eager to create the space-4x game they wanted to play, releases a game. That game naturally lacked the time and/or budget to get it to the level of previous genre-staples, and so sacrifices were made. That’s not to say this is a bad game – none of these games really are (apart from SOTS2, you bastard) – but it doesn’t exactly inspire either, which I feel is an important issue.

Horizon’s best selling point, I think, is its main scenario. It’s basically a non-equal start set-up, which differs from the majority of games at the moment that insist everyone starts with one planet, one city, one whatever and things evolve from there. As the Human Race, you have to take mankind out into the stars. But those stars are already filled with other races: races that probably don’t need another competitor for real-estate, and one ancient race in particular who’s obsessed with finding the perfect ‘companion’ race, and will wipe out anyone who doesn’t fit the bill. This lends itself to more storytelling and tension then the equal-start scenario does. If your neighbour happens to be one of these older races (being randomised, it’s possible), then you’ll have to work extra hard to keep them happy, otherwise they’ll just wipe you out. You can also choose to play as one of the other alien races, and they have their own storyline and starting set-up as well, so it’s not all about the humans.

You may think the green guys are in trouble, but those space stations pack a wallop

Spreading humanity amongst the stars is a relatively simple affair. Building colony ships is something you can do from the get go, although due to your low production output (as the humans, anyway), you’ll probably have to just click through the first few turns. Then it’s a matter of finding a habitable planet. Different races can live on different worlds (and some can live on all of them), but that is also something you can improve on through tech. Once you find a planet, your ship will land and create an ‘outpost’. This can be upgraded to a full-fledged colony, or left as is. It adds an interesting level of tactics to the strategic game, as supplies, lines of communication etc… are important factors of fleet movement and performance, but ones that are tied to planets. Your range extends with the borders of your empire, but plonking down outposts and leaving them as is provides an easy foothold into areas further afield. And they can also be taken down again afterwards.



If you do upgrade to a colony, you can develop it as you like – Farming, Industry, Trade, Research and Entertainment are the five areas you can choose to build up, and your choice of build determines what kind of planet it will turn out to be. Planets can be different sizes, and so are limited in how many buildings they can take – upgrading also uses up the limit. All planets can also have Starbases and Shipyards plonked in orbit, and can be outfitted with garrisons and defence batteries. This is basically all you’ll be doing in the strategic game – there is a ‘quest’ system that tries to tell the central story (And side-stories) more directly, but it’s a very slow process given the nature of the game, and personally I don’t think it really fits that well with how you play the game, so overall there’s not a lot of turn-to-turn excitement. Just management and expansion. As mentioned above you do get random bouts of tension as you try to manage relations with those much stronger than you, but the diplomatic interaction interface is quite limited.

The colony management screen. Fairly straight-forward

With not a lot of turn-to-turn excitement then, Horizon is probably quite clever in that it doesn’t show everything up front. Take tech, for example. Instead of advancing up an open and clearly defined tree, new techs are unlocked and discovered at a random pace, depending on what happens in that particular game. Each race starts off with their own basic techs which they can level up over time (and the more research facilities you build the faster this is achieved). But by discovering ancient ruins, or making breakthroughs, you can also discover new or similar techs. So the Humans start off with Nuclear Power, and through levelling up that tech they could discover Fusion Power, but then they also might discover some wreckage on a planet which then unlocks Organic Power, and so on… It makes you want to keep playing the game, just so you can see what happens next.

Combat, I’d have to say, is also a bit of a let-down. Its heart is definitely in the right place – a lot of people were put off by Endless Space’s more cinematic take on number crunching, and even StarDrive’s real-time offering had its flaws. This is a proper, old-school system that is all about positioning your ships and coordinating your forces. It doesn’t go for flashy visuals, which is fine but I can’t help but feel they haven’t even tried here (sorry, trying not to be too much of a snob about it), so the only enjoyment is through the tactics. There is one session of combat per turn, and each session comprises of 20 rounds. If you haven’t beaten your opponent by then you’ll have to wait until the next session, which will come after your next turn. Ships are generally equipped with some kind of missile, and then some kind of laser. Shields and armour plating zones mean that positioning your units is key – do you spread the damage about, or concentrate on one facing and try to overwhelm one side? Ships sizes range from small fighters and corvettes, to Cruisers and Motherships. And Weapon mounts are also varying in size.

The third great and bountiful Human Empire. Long may it reign

The problem I find with it though is that it’s not as intuitive as it could be. Positioning and the tactics surrounding that are easy to figure out, but then each weapon and ship has hit values and damage ranges. You might fire five missiles at a ship, and they all miss, and then the sixth one hits. Same goes with the laser type weapons – it’s not the randomness of it that bugs me, but it’s the fact that you’re never really given sufficient knowledge to be able to guess whether or not a weapon might hit. Also – Starbases seem quite OP at the moment, but that could just be a steam-roll prevention thing. At least you can skip combat if you find it’s getting too tedious, though.

Horizon then. Good ideas, but execution leaves something to be desired. Funnily enough, it’s the most stable game I’ve played recently – as far as bugs and glitches go, I’ve not encountered any. But there’s obviously room for improvement here. Combat would definitely need to be beefed up a bit, and there needs to be more things to do on the strategic layer then spread like some pixel-based disease. Even the quests could be made better. I wouldn’t go as far to say that this was released too early or anything – there is a fully functional, content filled game here, it’s just not as interesting as perhaps it could be. One to keep an eye on, definitely, but I’d hesitate to recommend you spend your money on it just yet.

Every time you discover a new tech, it’s a little bit exciting. New toys are always fun.