The Space Empires saga; much like a phoenix it has been broken, battered and finally reborn. Is this rebirth, however, enough?

To many the release of Space Empires IV was a disappointment as the game was riddled with bugs and glitches that made the complex game even more difficult to play well. Sadly, it seems they did not learn anything from the launch of the last game in the series and instead committed themselves to repeating the mistakes of the past.

Space Empires V has many changes that bring a necessary refresh to the series, such as a redesigned interface and a 3D engine. Finally the game can be seen in 3D, making the fights between ships and the graphics that make up the game far better looking than past iterations. Unfortunately, even with the two new patches since launch, the game is still crashing and freezing with a frequency that should not occur.

Granted the two patches have dropped the occurrence rate drastically, but the game still will crash at least once a session. The thing that makes this more annoying than it should be is that, by default, the Auto Save option is turned off. If you do not realize this beforehand then there is a chance you can lose a few hours of gameplay in a single crash back to your desktop.