Pandora: First Contact
Skip · Strategy · 2014
The verdict
SKIP IT.
It scores 11, under the fair line, at $29.99.
- Length
- 30h
- Value
- $1.00/hr
- Reviews
- 63% of 645 positive
Watch this gameOne alert at a price you pick.
Buy now or wait
Discounted in each of its last 8 seasonal sales. Last cut ended 11 days ago.
- Next sale
- Winter Sale, Dec 17 to Jan 4
Sources: IsThereAnyDeal, Valve.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
About the game
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.
Minimum specs
Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, 1 GB of storage. Windows only.
The value story
It has been discounted 69 times in the 12 years tracked here. The median cut across all of them is 75 percent, about 7 weeks apart. Today it is at full price, and its last discount ended 11 days ago.
It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 90 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Shadow Empire ($39.99, scores 34) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Civilization®: Beyond Earth™ ($39.99, scores 9).
More about Pandora: First Contact
Steam's global achievement data puts about 1 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. On a 30-hour game, the hours short of it still count in its price per hour.
The drop-off
84% start to 1% finishSteam counts fewer than one in ten of its players at the ending achievement. Steam global achievements
Players
- Players online
- 4 when we last checked, on Oct 3, 23:54 UTC
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
I thought this game was OK, but I gave up soon enough with AI that harasses you into making trade agreements that benefit AI more than the player. This is not specifically bad AI, but a function of a stated ruleset that the developers say is disadvantageous to the computer on normal mode.
2 more reviews, 2 not recommended
I normally don't post reviews, but can't sit on the sidelines for this one. Pros: * Great graphics * Friendly UI * 4X Cons: * Everything else Like many other reviewers have stated: the game is horribly unbalanced. The AI will have tech 4 times more advanced than you within 20-30 turns and then they free-for-all you the rest of the game. You no longer spend time growing and advancing - you are on the defensive...
Although a fully competent 4X game at core mechanics, two things really hold it back - the lack of any meaningful constraints on city spam, and an AI that doesn't care about diplomacy and will declare war on you the second it makes a naive calculation that it can win. If you want to play this game in any way other than conquest, you're out of luck, because one of the AI will eat all the others, then through sheer...
Steam reviews, mixed to its ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Pandora: First Contact scores 11/100 on the BANG Score (a skip) as of Oct 19, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/287580/pandora-first-contactReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 28, price as of Oct 18. A number here look wrong? Tell me and I will check the inputs.