Crying Suns

After finishing it, I can write a nice rewiew of the game... The encounters are repetitive.. in fact, you can just think the outcome of everyone of them, and just replay the same idea every time. The battles are very good and make you think.. the ships are excellent.. you need to re adapt for every one of them. The choice of weapons, fleets and officers are very nice.

Be prepared, be very prepared for a ride on on the rng mech bull....

The battles and gathering systems get boring after a while, and so does the exploration. Should have had more variety, because the writing is really good and engaging, so much so that it made me look past the gameplay flaws. Definitely buy when on sale, you'll get at least 10-12 hours out of it!

The primary unique factor behind Crying Suns is the story. It's a fairly decent take on a Space Opera, with lots and twists and turns, some obvious, others unexpected. For anyone who likes the story, the similar (but different) space game "House of the Dying Sun" is good and worth a look. The gameplay is good if you like tactical space battles, but yes, it could be considered repetative, though the enemy factions all play somewhat differently. I found it diverse enough to be worth completing without feeling like a grind. Personally I found a couple of the combat features superfluous: Anti-squadren weapons seemed pointless to me when you can have an anti-battleship weapons instead. Same for the ship "effects" - they're mostly too ephemeral to be useful. For my part I just ignored those and got on fine, but maybe they'll suit other playstyles. The art style is unique and very well done, even if I did occasionally struggle to make out features in the pixellated people; I guess that's an "artistic decision". Well worth it.

Crying suns has lots of style but lacks depth. The core principle borrows heavily from FTL, the battles, story and presentation stand on their own. The art is well crafted, the art direction seems inconsistent to me though: the animated sequences and characters are pixel art and everything else is high res 3D. This resembles the storytelling - the world and factions are worked out in far more detail than the characters, which is kind of typical for science fiction writing. Gameplay is ok, smooth and without any noticeable bugs, very repetitive though. Once you learn the controls and the very basic mechanics of the battles and events nothing new will happen. Basically each of the 6 chapters are exactly the same with some random events and slight story progression. Also, boss-fights are the same as normal fights, just lightly harder. The final fight is just a few boss-fights after each other. Design-wise I don´t like that you can´t load a saved game after you die, but have to start over the entire chapter. So for example, when you are taken down by the boss at the end of a chapter then it´s 2-4 hours of gameplay you just have to repeat. That should give you some sense of urgency I guess. But for me it just results in playing on "easy" all the time because I don´t have that much time to waste.