Pandora: First Contact
Pandora: First Contact is a science fiction 4X turn-based strategy game on a planetary scale. Our Earth has been exhausted and colonial attempts on other planetary bodies have been in vain. Finally, after decades of exploration, an interstellar probe has brought promise of a new world.
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Shadow Empire on Steam
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Shadow Empire is a deep turn-based 4X wargame with a unique blend of military focus, procedurally generated content and role-playing features. Players take the seat of the supreme ruler of a small nation, with the goal of reconquering a devastated planet.
Shadow Empire is a strategy, simulation and 4x game
developed by VR Designs
and published by Matrix Games.
Released on December 03rd 2020 is available only on Windows.
It has received 1,435 reviews of which 1,177 were positive and 258 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.8 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 38.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 8.08€ on Eneba.
The Steam community has classified Shadow Empire into these genres:
Strategy
Simulation
4X
RPG
Wargame
Turn-Based Strategy
Hex Grid
Sci-fi
Turn-Based
Grand Strategy
War
Space
Singleplayer
Multiplayer
Replay Value
Aliens
Tactical
Turn-Based Combat
Management
Asynchronous Multiplayer
Here is the detailed breakdown of supported languages for Shadow Empire:
| UI | Subtitle | Audio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| English |
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Shadow Empire through various videos and screenshots.
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System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows Windows 8, Windows 10
- Processor: 1.5 GHZ
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 8MB video memory, 1280x768 or higher resolution
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 1 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX Compatible 9 Sound Card
Steam Price & Best Deals
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Great game, not sure what else to say. One of those games that is extremely off putting at first but once you dive into it a 100 or so hours, it really grows on you. It rewards mastery. I see a lot of people recently complained about "AI slop" (WRT artwork) but you are free to turn it off, literally an option to revert back to the original non-AI art and the designer was clear about that. Lot of people complain about the UI, learning curve, etc BUT it's literally a grand strategy game, the entire genre is RTFM and "go watch a lot of lets plays by experts first", it's not a ADHD casual game. It's like any hex game pre-2000, you got to learn the game before you can play it. Not saying it's perfect, not by a long shot, but it is a Sci Fi GTS and those are rare, can't think of a single PC game that has did that, most of the ones people would compare are 4x, not GSG.
Going to give a positive review to counteract the recent mixed review score. Starting with the obvious: This game is not for everyone. It is made for a small audience of people who enjoy complexity and know the dwarf fortess motto "losing is fun". The new DLC has made it much more "fun", as it introduced anti-snowballing mechanics to maintain difficulty through the whole game. This makes it so that frustration is guaranteed unless you REALLY know what you are doing. About the game: This is NOT the typical 4X where you are the sole ruler of an empire and every decision is automatically enacted. You are an actor, as much as the people in your government are, specially with the Republica DLC. It is a game of balancing what you want to do, against what your government leaders and citiciens want to. This makes it so that conquering the planet is as difficult as maintaining a coherent system that allows you to do so. This is weird at first, but allows infinite more immersion, and satisfaction when obtaining the goal of conquering your neighbours. There are valid criticisms of this game: - This game has had really bad interface since day one. There are hundreds of screens that need to be checked contantly, with information that seems to be hidden for the player until you discover where it is. - There are mechanics that seem that are just boring or that add really bad gameplay friction... I really hate how formation types are managed, how unit version design works, how some political acts are almost random based on the card system... - How the game seems to have an algorithmic approach to punishing the player that seems somewhat tiresome. However, most issues in the past have been improved in the past with updates from the dev, and I really hope it continues to do so.
A genuinely unique and incredible 4x. It's hard to condense everything into a review, but it combines Dwarf Fortress-tier map and history generators, Grognard-tier logistics and combat systems, and absurdly complex character management and political systems. It's amazing that it all hangs together at all, but it does. The main complaint you'll see, which is legit, is that documentation, tooltips and UI affordances are sparse. But, once you've spent the several dozen hours to get acquainted, this ♥♥♥♥ is like crack to the humble autistic mapgamer. Absolutely does not deserve its current "Mixed" rating on Steam - I found the AI-generated art to be a significant improvement from the older assets, but they are optional either way.
Game is fun and I've spent a lot of time playing it. The complaints about AI are overblown given that the dev is one person. Games have used procedural generation for years, this is just the next iteration of it. The few images that look off are getting patched out, and the actual gameplay is still great regardless. Give it a chance.
Shadow Empires is amazing. Insanely crazy good 4x. One of those indie games you discover, is made by just one guy, and is that person's singular vision and passion wrapped into a cool product. Easy 9/10, could be 10/10 if the next military DLC hits and maybe they fix diplo a little. What is it: SE is a scifi 4x game, blended with a WWII hex-and-counter wargame. There is also a lot of procedural worldgen, which is the first shining star of the game. You live on a planet settled by the Galactic Republic. You generate everything about the planet from its orbit, to the size&gravity, to temperature. All of this impacts the water content, mineral content (literally your resource availability), to the complexity of life you can find. Then you generate a population & story for the settling of your planet and its apex at the height of the GR. Then you generate your apocalypse and how many billions die during the great Dissolution War. From there you play a 4x. You start with one city, and expand outwards rapidly. The game has a very unique conception of borders, theyre fluid until theyre not. At first I found this quite odd, but have gotten used to it after a few plays and it can be quite historically accurate for IRL societies of the type being shown. The tradeoff is that exploration is pretty diminished compared to the expanding pillar of the 4x. Instead of exploration, another major pillar is your internal politics & personnel management (made even better with the Republica DLC just released). Every turn you generate strategem cards which you spend political points to play. They do everything from attach priests to your combat units, to opening peace negotiations, to managing your interior politics. You have characters, who get assigned to jobs, who have often complex interior lives and hold ideologies which impact what kind of society they want to live in. You also get your now-standard random events which are usually well written and force you to take sides in ways that please some, piss others off, and slowly over several turns modify the kind of society you live in. They can even participate in the civilian economy, which runs entirely outside of player control & builds assets/resource generators they profit off of, which can sometime help your nation for free, but which can be less efficient for the 4x loop. Eg. you get a free metal mine, but only 30% of the metal it generates. Do you nationalize it, hurt the civilian economy, and cost yourself tons of cash or are you just happy with the 30%? Versus a hospital or private university which just provides its benefit to the city, but needs a healthy economy to provide the start up cost. And then there is the combat. This is built in the now-traditional digital hex-and-counter style. Fans of Gary Grigsby's games will find this to be familiar but shallow by comparison. Its more similar in depth I would say to SGS's modules, also on Steam. What differentiates this from those kinds of games is the huge amount of customizability you have. The game is both Scifi & WWII, made possible because of course your living in the post-post apocalypse. Your plucky band of scavengers is one of a few nations starting to pull it together and restore the world to its GR-era success. So you start with infantry or, super advanced, infantry in *trucks*. Much wow. You'll quickly get tanks, AT guns, AA guns, aircraft, and all the other pieces you would come to expect from a WWII-level force. Alongside of that though, you can find relics of the GR like crates of laser rifles, walkers, super tanks, etc. And eventually you can tech up enough to graft that onto your own platforms. But the basic assumptions are of a 1940 style of warfare. Footmobile infantry holds lines, mot/mech forces break through encircle & exploit. To get to that point, you have to engage in a research/design loop which is the other unique core of this game. Say you unlock light tanks, cool. But you don't just build tanks now like in other 4x games. Instead you have discovered the concept of tanks, but now much actualize it in a design phase. You pick your basic features (eg, how big is the gun) which impact cost & stats. Then your design guy does some paperwork and a few turns later your design is revealed. You then check, in a menu, how well your design guy did. Did he make something generationally amazing, or a real dud. At some point you'll likely want to redesign the tank, which of course you can do, and that restarts the process from picking your features. However there is a field testing mechanic which increases your likelihood of getting a good design if you use it a lot in combat. Beyond this neat loop, you can also customize your OOBs to incorporate new equipment. Your motorized infantry, for example, start out as dudes in trucks. But as you move forward you can add more trucks, MG dudes, AT guns, etc. Which can address the shortcomings of any unit, at the cost of more resources. But all this gives you total flexibility over your military and lets you tailor it to meet a variety of different kinds of AI empires. The big weaknesses of SE, and the reason why I dont think I'd call it a 10/10 are diplo and the slowness with which some of these mechanics roll out. Diplo is done by strategem card, mentioned above, and dice rolls. Neither one is in isolation a big drag. I kind of like the idea that you can just force trade agreements, ala Total War, but have to wait for the right 'moment' for your civ to broach the subject. And in a character based game, using your diplo minister to roll for negotiations makes total sense. But in some cases it can be SUPER frustrating. Most AI regimes generally dislike you, in part owing to the fluid borders. AFAIK taking hexes from neutral regimes causes diplo hits (even if they were yours to begin with!) On top of that, its hard to get cards to make neutrals like you. And early on hard to have good leaders who roll well to beat the difficulty for good outcomes. Were talking about like 70+ difficulty on D100 rolls. Even with the +20 skill check card you can get, you'd maybe do that 50% of the time. And then peace? Forget it. On my current playthrough, to peace out with a major regime attacking me I'd need to roll a 90+ after modifiers, on a card I've generated twice in 110 turns. And all this leads to the other big drag, the slowness for a lot of these mechanics. The game is structured as if you'll play 1k turns. But after 100 I controlled 20% of the hexes on the map. If I wanted to play super aggressively, I might win in the next 50ish turns. 100 if I dont get the techs/cards I need. But in all this time I just havn't been able to develop much of the currency needed to make changes. Pop increases slowly, recruits take a while to build up, and the OOB points you need to edit OOBs generates at a rate of like 10/turn with a pretty good leader. You need over 80 to make *one* chance to a basic unit's OOB, and over 300 to modify a bigger composite unit. So if it takes me 100 turns to beat the game, I'll get maybe 10/11 more single item changes to OOBs? Hardly enough. Oh and you need to unlock/establish the job to make these changes, so you may not get started even generating points until 30-40 turns in. In this area the game needs a MASSSIVE amount of rebalancing. I wouldn't hate it if the game lasted a lot longer, perhaps with larger planet surfaces or smaller hexes. At the current scale, I think the speed of access to some of these features need to increase dramatically. And of course diplo needs an entire rethink. But beyond this, this game is amazing and really delivers. If youre a fan of 4x's this is a hidden gem. Edit: I should also quickly add the use of AI in this game, AFAIK its just for art . There is a feature to disable this AI art and use only the placeholder faux-3d art. Both are bad options. The AI art has very little unified aesthetic and it sucks. But the 3D models are coherent but ugly.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Shadow Empire is currently priced at 38.99€ on Steam.
No, Shadow Empire is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 38.99€ on Steam.
Yes, Shadow Empire received 1,177 positive votes out of a total of 1,435 achieving a rating of 7.84.
😊
Shadow Empire was developed by VR Designs and published by Matrix Games.
Yes, Shadow Empire is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, Shadow Empire is not playable on MacOS.
No, Shadow Empire is not playable on Linux.
No, Shadow Empire is not playable on Steam Deck.
This information about Shadow Empire is not available yet.
No, Shadow Empire does not support VR.
Shadow Empire offers both single-player and multi-player modes.
Shadow Empire offers both Co-op and PvP modes.
Yes, there are 2 DLCs available for Shadow Empire. Explore additional content available for Shadow Empire on Steam.
No, Shadow Empire does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
No, Shadow Empire does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, Shadow Empire is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Shadow Empire.
Data sources
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 02 October 2026 05:40 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 16 October 2026 16:44 UTC |
| Steam price | 27 October 2026 04:11 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 18 October 2026 09:54 UTC |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Shadow Empire, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Shadow Empire
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Shadow Empire concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Shadow Empire compatibility
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Game modes
Multiplayer
Features
Online players
83
Developer
VR Designs
Publisher
Matrix Games
Release
03 Dec 2020
Platforms
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