Stellaris

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted March 19, 2026 on Steam DO NOT BUY THE STARTER PACK THEY ARE GIVING THIS FOR FREE AS PART OF THE BASE GAME SOON Other than that, My favourite game of all time.
• Not recommended Posted January 20, 2026 on Steam I loved Stellaris, right up until it became clear I was being DLC farmed by Paradox while still waiting for them to fix major base-game issues. My experience went like this: love the game, can’t get enough of it, but can’t actually finish campaigns because of late-game performance problems. A new DLC releases, I buy it, the core issues remain unfixed. The DLC introduces new problems, those aren’t fixed either. Then another DLC releases. Rinse and repeat. I may have been born in the morning, but I wasn’t born yesterday. There’s only so much rose-colored glasses can excuse, and I hit that limit a year ago. The only reason I hadn’t written a review sooner was I was hoping the performance issues would be fixed then out of pure disgust after they introduced the DLC subscription model. So no, I do not recommend this game, not because it isn’t fun (it absolutely is), but because certain business practices shouldn’t be encouraged unless you’re comfortable being endlessly farmed for cash.
• Recommended Posted June 3, 2025 on Steam Stellaris is a “just one more year” simulator where 4 a.m. arrives faster than your ring-world megastructure. One minute you’re naming a planet “New Earth,” the next you’re diplomatically apologizing to space penguins. Expect to spend 30% of your game-time in pause mode, 30% hurling fleets at an end-game crisis and 40% scrolling through the DLC page wondering how a black hole also swallowed your wallet.
• Recommended Posted June 26, 2025 on Steam Hate the 4.0+ update, but the earlier versions of this game are great. I have 130+ hours and I’ve just barely scratched the surface of what you can do Just reminding everyone you can easily play earlier versions of the game: settings (in the game’s library page) -> properties -> betas -> then pick whatever version you want to play
• Not recommended Posted March 23, 2026 on Steam This is probably the best thing i can describe for this game.... and really any paradox game in general. You buy the game. it is something super cool and interesting and up your alley. They send an update. the game is completely new and different. they replace so many things that it doesn't feel like the same game. you get used to it. They release a major update. And the cycle continues. At this point Stellaris has been about 5 different games with a similar backbone. I got this back when asymmetric FTL was a thing and it was the key draw point for me. it was unique and interesting. It was one of the first things that went. Alot of things i loved of the older versions are gone or overshadowed by what is current It also used to be fun with friends. but... that is not a thing anymore for me. Ever since last years major update. Current update stellaris has been completely unplayable for us in multiplayer due to rampant Desync issues. If your going to play multiplayer. Hope to god your not friends with someone on another continent. because your not playing with them. It sucks for me to say this. but the game is too buggy to be a positive for me. My biggest gripe is the Desyncs and lack of locking onto a vision of what they want the game to be.
• Not recommended Posted June 5, 2025 on Steam I have enjoyed this game since it launched. Through every iteration of this game I have had fun playing even with the major changes to fundamental systems and all of their flaws. With the release of 4.0 this is no longer true. There are 3 major issues I have with 4.0: pops, buildings, and performance. The new pop system is worse than the older one. This "upgrade" isn't like the first one which changed the very old tile system into pop system which has been through most of this games' lifespan. That system was, in all aspects, an upgrade. It made the game more enjoyable and allowed game-play to be much deeper and expanded in ways that were not possible before. It was simple and easy to understand. The new system is none of those things. The update makes understanding the UI much harder at a glance. I do not understand why making everything in multiples of 100s was an idea that got approved. Before I could glance over tool-tips and immediately under how many pops building use or how much housing they give. Now I have to think for half a second to compute all of that. While this isn't much, it is enough to impact the speed of everything I do. The slow down isn't significant enough to cause me to really think about things like which buildings I need to place on specific planets or which tech option to research base on the current situation my empire is in, but it is significant enough to be a slight inconvenience and interrupt the flow of gameplay which makes this game less enjoyable. The most generous take I can give it is that is a side-grade. That would have been my take if it weren't for performance but I will get to that later. Now onto buildings. This system did not need an update. It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough to being perfect that I thought any change to it would be a net negative to the game-play loop. 4.0 proved that assumption to be correct. I get what the developers were thinking with the new system, i really do. Having individual districts have their own building slots is a neat and novel idea. However, a neat and novel idea is not always the best to implement. The new building system is a strict downgrade on the old one. Is was much simpler, and this update was not needed. The developers fixed a problem that did not need solving. Last is performance. Oh boy... performance. I have been a paradox game player for well over a decade now so lag and poor performance is nothing new to me. Each and every paradox game as issues with late-game performance, except for the greatest pdx game of all-time March of the Eagles, my beloved. This performance is different with every title. Some were bad, others were... shall I say... less bad. Stellaris regularly placed towards the bottom. This I was okay with, I am used to it. With 4.0 the new pop changes were made to help with performance. I would be fine with the pop systems' current implementation if the performance improved. I do not know how but performance got WORSE. The change, which to me is a side-grade at best, a change wholly made to FIX performance made it worse. The 4.0 update failed. Completely. In every regard. I do not know who made the decision to release 4.0, but that person needs to be fired. I will not and do not believe that the performance issues were not known. I noticed it immediately while playing my first 4.0 game. If i noticed it that quickly and easily, then devs also noticed it. Shipping the update in the state it is in is simply inexcusable. Well there is my rant. Its been fun Stellaris, it really has. I just wish you were in better hands, you don't deserve this. So long space cowboy.