Stardock decided to go all-out with its second and final expansion to Galactic Civilizations II, and the efforts clearly show. Chief among the improvements is the graphics update that practically makes the game look brand new. Ships have excellent detail, and custom made designs come to life with the addition of animated parts. Planets also look more distinct, with different backgrounds to denote volcanic, green or barren worlds. The makeover continues across factions, with race-specific buildings that establish a strong sense of identity. Some of the buildings are so race-specific that they are unusable by conquerors that launch ground invasions. Creating a stronger race identity does wonders for the GalCiv2, since it wipes away the sameness that each faction suffered from before. Each race's identity also shows in the revised tech trees, which now includes a handful of unique technologies that only specific races can research. It adds an extra item to bargain with in diplomatic negotiations. However, acquiring these unique technologies through trade doesn't open new research branches, and they generally don't offer anything too different from the main technologies.

The list of enhancements and game tweaks goes on, but general tasks like empire and economy management are much improved. Players can bring up a list of all the leases and maintenance across the empire to find out where all the money is going. Highlighting a technology now provides a numeric listing of its bonuses, which makes planning significantly easier. Those players that can't get enough exploration out of their game now have the option to generate Immense maps to overcome, or they can create their own with the map customization tool. Twilight of the Arnor closes off GalCiv2 with a huge send off by including a large host of customization tools. Custom races can even have their own unique technology trees, along with tools to create custom scenarios, campaigns and planetary improvements.

Twilight of the Arnor leaves practically nothing to be desired, and it's the near perfect expansion to close out the GalCiv2 storyline. Its weakest point comes surprisingly from the Terror Star, a massive superweapon that consumes stars and destroys solar systems. It's meant as an end game clean-up option, and it's a blast to use, but it requires a large amount of resources to build and moves so dreadfully slow that it's usually far easier to eliminate rival factions using more traditional means. We still have a few issues regarding some of the gameplay, mostly carried over from previous chapters. Spies are a little too easy to overcome, especially given the amount of time an resources that goes into producing them. It still takes an extraordinary amount of time and resources to establish close relations with a race to form an alliance, even with the artificial intelligence updates, which makes one chapter in the campaign feel very drawn out. It would also be nice to have a strong visual indicator or announcement letting players know when a rival race is wiped out. Yet these concerns can be overlooked, since Twilight of the Arnor brings so many great features to GalCiv2.

Current fans shouldn't have to think very hard about picking up this expansion. Twilight of the Arnor makes GalCiv2 almost feel like a new game. Altogether, one of the best turn-based empire building strategy games out today is improved in practically every sense, which makes it one incredible send off for the series.

Download the Galactic Civilizations II Gold Demo