Crying Suns

Many, many reviews other reviews covering the (repetivite) gameplay, story etc. If you've played the demo, you've basically played the whole game. SERIOUSLY. In the full version you get to fight some different artsytles, and if you play through those you can pixel swap your battleship too. The only reason to pay for the full version is the story/setting ambiance . Which has plenty to reviews covering it already. Probably wait to buy it on a big sale. The devs deserve some cash for the art and music, but with the shallowness of the game honestly don't shell it out too much money

The game starts promissing, offering you deep and interesting lore with allusions to Frank Herbert's Dune and other sci-fi masterpieces; gameplay-wise showing something akin (to the point of being plagiarized) to The Shortest Trip to Earth or FTL... but in reality it turned out to be raw, epmty and unbalanced garbage - with the same encounters happening over and over, difficulty spikes popping out of nowhere. Boss fights are a mess too. The whole playthrough you were told that there are some rules: deployement speed, amount of weapons, their cooldown, amount of aquads available. And then suddenly the bosses have none of those at the same time. It's like playing a chess with someone who wins not by being a better player but having two rows of bishops at his disposal.

The basic gameplay is FTL-like, with, however, several important improvements. First, the sectors are notably shorter - you have time to make strategic choices and gather resources, but it never becomes a grind. Second, in essentially EVERY situation, there is always SOMETHING you can do - some approach to take, some specific use of your units - to win the fight. This is one of FTL's biggest and most frustrating flaws, that you can play for a while and get deep into the game and then, bam, the game throws a couple random things at you and it adds up to "there's nothing you can do, start from scratch". That never happens in Crying Suns: you always have options. Third, there is no single optimal build or loadout or set of tactics. I've won fights by zerging the enemy with stealth fighters, by keeping all the fighters close to home and relying on beam weapons, by juggernauts, or by combined arms assaults. I've played with shield tanks, armor tanks, buffer tanks, or no tank at all. It all works and it's all fun. In this regard the game is true to the roguelike heritage of Moria and Nethack. The story is not quite as big a twist as it would like to be, but it's coherent, true to itself, and makes sense. The random dialogue from your bridge crew reads like it could come straight out of a David Weber novel. I'm not the biggest fan of David Weber but for rayguns & spaceships, it's exactly the right tone. Alt-Shift's grasp of game balance and fun game mechanics is excellent and I am in the very strange place, for me, of having no suggestions for changes. They have created a very interesting setting and IP here, and I'd love to revisit it if they do more.

Pros: - Excellent combat with a good variety of builds and strategies to try. - Fun enemy AI. It's not braindead, as it is capable of recognizing choke point situations it needs to try to avoid. Sure, the AI sucks with cruisers and battleship weapons... But other than that, the AI here is solid. - Unlike FTL, you don't have to dread the endpoint of your runs, as the end-run bosses are actually fun. - More accessible than FTL- especially since the lowest difficulty setting doesn't block you off from unlocks. Cons: - Nowhere NEAR enough event variety. You'll start seeing repeated events pretty frequently with your third run onward. This discourages exploration- leading to play styles where you'll just make beelines for ground signals and shops, ignoring everything else. - Can get pretty repetitive overall.

TLDR I very much enjoyed this game. Saying it's the next FTL is a bit of a stretch tho. Except for some of the combat feeling similar they are in fact very different. While FTL has no story to speak of, but massive amounts of replayability(i have 300h in it), this game has a fantastic Sci-fi story to keep you going, but it's unlikely that you will want to play it over and over again after finishing it. Let's break it down a bit: Story- its great, I was really invested in it. Reminds me a lot of Mass effect...about the end of humanity and how insignificant we are in this infinite place and how machines will outlast us. Very strong part of the game. Music- fantastic, very much FLT-like, but there isn't much of it sadly. User interface- It must be mentioned...it is phenomenal...the best most beautiful UI I've ever seen...every button, every screen, every transition is just a pleasure to look at. Graphics- really nice pixel graphics Combat, the big one- very enjoyable, for a while. FTL style customization of your ship and real-time-with-pause combat between you and your enemy. But, instead of a more personal feeling that FTL offers, where you have your small crew that you name after your friends etc and care about them...here as an admiral the combat is very much impersonal. Also there isn't that much depth to it sadly, I'm pretty sure someone who is really good at it will find a build to beat everything easily. But it gets you interested all the way to the end and provides many tense moments. Also as far as I can tell, starting the game again is pretty much pointless, since the game doesn't generate enough "random OMG" moments like FTL did. Overall- I enjoyed it a lot, for 23 bucks I spent 26 hours playing, so I say it was worth it, very much so. If they could invest more into it and maybe add an "Adventure mode" or something...with more random events, more impactful items etc they could make this the next FTL and I hope they consider it, I would love to play more.