The game is fine, let's not make any bones about it. It follows in the Civ V tradition, in that you can only have one unit in one hexagon at at time, no more stacking of mega armies. The world is nice, the technology tree, once you get a handle on how it works, is also nice since the last patch that happened somewhere around November ‘15 and updated the tech web to something resembling the expansions – much improved. Diplomacy on the base game as released was a sad joke. AI players would come begging for strategic resources in return for 'favours’ that were not a useful currency for getting anything back from them, and they'd go from allied to war in the blink of an eye. Diplomacy has been completely re-designed in the expansion and I don't know how much of that re-design has filtered back in to the patches of the original release. Sadly, the base game has a dearth of content. There's only a handful of alien units. There are not a huge number of units you can achieve through research. Eventually (mid game) you will be totally overpowered when it comes to slaughtering aliens, which do not level up. And then you deal with the AI players, or you just research and build your way to one of the victory conditions, some of which are dependent on your choice of promoting ‘purity’, ‘harmony’, or ‘superiority’ in your culture. And that's it. Replayability, I decided, was not great — until the expansion came out. THAT was a game changer. The game is now much filled out, and definitely gained a lot of variety and replayability. I can only highly recommend the combination of the two.

This game is pretty good but I can't really give it 5 stars as in reality, it doesn't feel like a “new game”. I've played various iterations of Civilization over the years but this one just feels like a repackaged Civilization V. You could almost overlay the game experience over V and essentially be playing the same game. Sure, you're on another planet and the tech is futuristic, but the similarities just smack of a lazy approach by the developers to repackage previous versions. If you're looking for a new game that sets itself apart from the recent versions, you might be disappointed in this title, but if you're ok with it, then it's a game that you may enjoy. 4 stars from me and would have been 5 had the game offered some originality.

I first encountered Civ with Civ 2, Test of Time. That was a very playable game, pretty straightforward, with fewer victory terms, and sometimes insanely aggressive AI, even on lower levels. Diplomacy was fun. I even got threatened by an AI with their “mighty armies”, which turned out to be one phalanx, vs an entire stack of WW2 units. Beyond Earth is a bit too cute, AI isn't that much of a threat. I enjoy the global scale stuff, but this “cultural accountancy” is a bit much. That said, the basics are OK, and the exploration is often interesting. I'd prefer this game to be less scripted, but the 3 star rating is a fair description.