Once your empire begins to grow you’ll start butting heads with other empires, so taking the time early on to suck in as much of the world as possible is highly recommended. Just from exploring the nooks and cranny’s of the galaxy, you’ll find bits of interesting sub-stories that help flesh out the world of Stellaris. Discovering resources and anomalies on adjacent planets and stars is genuinely fascinating and is one of my favourite things to do. Calling a game slow-paced isn’t usually something gamers want to hear, but in the case of Stellaris, it’s actually a positive. Stellaris is great at teaching the ropes, but it’s even better at letting the player experiment and explore at their own pace. The only problem is the text size - sometimes it can come across as a little small, even on a large TV. You can dive pretty deep into your empire’s political system, decide who’s going to captain your ships, or just absorb the game’s deep lore from the codex.

Getting familiar with the menu system is definitely worth memorizing.

After that, you can click in the left thumbstick to focus in on the ship, no matter where on the map it is. For instance, pressing right accesses your science vessel menu, which allows you to select or build new science ships to survey the galaxy for anything of interest. The shining star is the D-pad where each direction corresponds to a different menu dedicated to a specific area of your empire. Complimenting the tutorial is a surprisingly intuitive controller layout that, while may take some time getting used to, feels particularly fleshed and thought out.

It’s fairly persistent and always helpful at the right times, and can even be turned off when you don’t need it anymore. Playing Stellaris can be intimidating at first - especially if it’s your first 4X - but thanks to a robust and thoughtful opening tutorial, the game does its darnedest not to overwhelm you.

How to play stellaris xbox one