Like East India Company before it, the game plays on autopilot a lot of the time and doesn't push back nearly enough to be interesting. Natives are a scattered presence you don't have to deal with most of the time. Your European rivals are happy to ignore you or offer you trade pacts – they are kind of chicken about actually going to war with you. That means that the naval battles – larger and more intuitive than they were in the first Nitro game – will be few and far between.

This means that those battles never wear out their welcome, at least. When you do fight a battle, it's because you intend to. The ocean is big, and there are lots of ways to get where you want to go. Sometimes a colony will be right at a chokepoint and you can mercilessly cut it off from supply and support, but for the most part you can avoid the enemy if you pay attention. Battles move pretty quickly and look great.

The biggest thematic problem with Commander is that the colonies never really feel like they are part of an empire. They are relatively self-sufficient and though you can have one colony as your production hub, money is easy enough to come by and buildings so relatively inexpensive that any port can manage its own affairs just fine. You move luxury goods from the Old World when a colony demands it, but beyond that it's setting up routes that are profitable and every transoceanic route is somewhat profitable for a long time. Though Nitro's games closely resemble the count-your-shekels design of 2001's Trade Empires, it has none of that game's subtlety with supply and demand, changing business needs or changing imperial priorities. Locking the fanciest ships up until early mid-game is also a problem since it means you will be seeing the same types of ships carrying the same amount of cargo for a very long time.

So with two misses, you would think I have gone sour on Nitro, but I haven't. This game is so lovingly crafted and I'm sure that given time and money and staff there is a great game idea in there. But so far what we have seen is two very similar games with very similar problems. The world needs to push back; the missions need to get more serious more quickly and there needs to be greater stakes than whether you make 150,000 bucks this year or 200,000. I think Nitro has that game in them. Alas, this is not it.

Troy Goodfellow is a regular contributor to GameShark and many other sites. He is strategy columnist for PCGamer magazine, blogs regularly at Flash of Steel where he hosts a strategy game themed podcast, Three Moves Ahead .