Crying Suns

This game gives a FANTASTIC first impression; a gorgeous visual style FTL with an attempt at actually telling a compelling story. I'm guessing the universal 5 stars are all based on this early impression. The short of it is that it's FTL. The biggest difference is that in combat, your ship's weapons play a smaller role and most of combat is done by 2-4 squadrons of smaller ships you send out. You try to neutralize the enemy squadrons while clearing the way for yours to damage the enemy ship. Sort of like if ship to ship combat in FTL was mostly handled via an expanded crew to crew combat. And here's the problem: the squadrons feel clunky as hell to control. This is a big problem because 80% of the game is combat and 80% of the combat is controlling squadrons. They control clunky, and minimal effort was made to differentiate them all by their white silhouette icons, made even worse once you start getting specialized squadrons (which one was the suicide drone and which one was the stealth fighter again?). Strategy? You quickly figure out that neutralizing enemy squadrons is all that matters, so you stop bothering with capital ship weapons and just focus on the 2 types of anti-squadron guns. Then you just pick the rock to whatever scissors the enemy is deploying. That's basically it. Hope some random terrain effect or surprise hidden popup squadron doesn't screw you, and that the RNG drops better squadrons so you don't get outclassed (squadron strength is all that matters; everything else is a minor luxury). There are segments where you send landing parties down to scavenge planets. They are 40 seconds of watching the game roll dice before being told if you succeeded or failed. These get old FAST. Buy if money isn't an object and you want to be wowed for a couple hours, but I'm on the 3rd cluster right now and barely want to keep going. Needs some work to open up the combat and tighten up the squadron controls.

+ Yes, it's an FTL successor + Yes, it's Herbert, Azimov and Reynolds + It's the pixelated graphics married perfectly to 3D. + The kind of music you would expect from a good spacefaring game + With heavy influence of Star Control. But still an original, well thought-through, solid game. I've been waeiting for this kind of game for over 2 years!

It is a nice game with great potential nice story, and absolutely stunning visuals. What is lacking for me is more ship customization options, and shallow combat, which gets repetitive quite quickly. I love FTL, and in my opinion its combat system both in depth and variability of different approaches is better....

This was my first supported game on the Kickstarter. After I “packed” it I was able to play the closed and then public demo. Already those short stories were an awesome experience. Now finally you get a full game where you can make a experience with a commander who was sleeping for a long time. It seems the whole galaxy is full of enemies but you also find some people which don’t want to fight. But here is the awesome part, the exploration is random, but the fights are really tactical and really enjoyable.