Crying Suns

Story could be cool, the atmosphere for sure is! Now if the cockpit would change with the ship, the writing would be good, the systems more minimalized / predictable and at the same time more challenging on "normal", it'd be up there with an FTL. As it is, it's still good Indie sci fi.

I am a fan of Dune / Foundation series and the books of Isaac Asimov, so I appreciated the winks in the story writing to those roots. The combat, exploration and rogue-like element to the game are all fun as well. I liked to different ships and combat strategies and how in a single play through you were able to try out all of the different ships. It is a fun game, doesn't take very long to complete and is definitely worth it if you are a sci-fi fan.

This is review of art only, since to assess the battle experience will take much longer. I love the art direction, I like the mysterious atmosphere and most of all, i enjoy the ambiant music, which does happen rarely. If it manages to hold to high standart of first hours, we might have new "FTL" on our hands. Hopefully, when the ghost gets caught, it wont be Velma.

This game is shallow containing nothing but the shallow and transparent illusion of strategy and choice. Still it's almost good enough. But almost good enough is THE defining description of almost every aspect of it's gameplay and design. It's like every time an aspect of design was considered the solution was ALWAYS "the barest possibly minimum". The sum of the barest possible minum turns out to be slightly less than it's parts. Then the laughably bad story comes in and kicks the slightly less than minimum standard of the game play in the nads repeatedly. OH MY GOD I do not have the available word count to describe how bad the story is in so very many ways. So lets just try just this little piece of the what the god damn hell... The super robots changed everything by changing nothing about the economy or class structure. They were only available to the super rich. There was definitely still a human underclass that still did all the hard work and had no access to super robots the story stops at one point just to point this out. Then the super robots went away for reasons that really really don't ever end up mattering. Most humans died immediately from poorly defined chaos. But then the rest slowly starved for 20 years because all the humans on thousands of thousands of worlds including the massive working class that did all the hard work FORGOT HOW TO MAKE FOOD. Also it's taken 20 years to not completely starve despite there being no food. But in between 10 to 100 years depending on which part of the story you ask everyone WILL finally finish dieing from forgetting how to food. But at one point you are told if you decided to be bad hated emperor for ONE THOUSAND years then and ONLY then at the end of that humans will be alive AND just MAYBE might have learned how to food again! That is like just one 48th of the crazy bad in the story and lore of this game.

If you have grown up reading Asimov and Dune you must buy this game! The Universe is littered with references not only from classic Sci-fi but also real life Science (one of the crew members is named Karl popper for example.) The game is very FTL like but with more tactical depth. The drone combat happens in a board game style hexagon space with procedurally generated asteroid fields, automated turrets, EMP towers etc.. Making each encounter have a unique way in which to gain an edge. For example I had acquired what seemed like a useless teleporter gun which did no damage. However on a map with automated turrets teleporting it into turret range is an effective way to take out enemy drones without doing any work. I saw other reviews complaining about the Ground expeditions, I do recommend speeding them up to the 3x speed to make them go faster but the ground expeditions are exciting if you understand what is happening during them. Not every expedition is capable of giving the same rewards, Cryo pods can only give extra Crew mates for example. Planning which expeditions to go on depending on your needs such as more crew or a chance to find new ship weapons or just trying to get more scrap is where the decision making factors into this aspect of the game. Other complaints I saw were about differentiating between the drones on the battlefield. While this is somewhat true( you can actually tell which drones are higher grade by how MANY there are, not so much what they look like). But the game provides a useful UI on the side to help you direct the exact Drone squads you want anyway. The story! The story! Its like every one of my favourite Sci-fi stories all rolled into one and I still didn't know how it was going to end. I actually think the story in this game is better than the way the later Dune books evolved. So what dont I like? Lack of variety in the random encounters (hoping they fix this) Similar situations do frequently occur and resolve in similar ways....