Sins of a solar empire review

Overall-9/10

Gameplay-9/10
Good
-4X strategy is back(finally!!)
-lesser emphasize on diplomacy
-Deep interesting research tree
-Not as complicated as it seems
Fugly
-No campaign?!
-most units are similar among the 3 races
-a larger scale would be prefered,maybe higher unit caps or unit comes in squadron
-time consuming!!!

Visuals-8/10
Good
-zoom from solar system to ships close up view seamlessly
-nice phase jump animation
Fugly
-texture is bad,especially planets
-need more kick ass looking capital ships
-combat animation could be more destructive

eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate,sounds interesting but 4X strategy is a dying genre now.First, its a massive project to make with lots of components to attend and if one screws up,all your effort goes down the drain.Second, kids these days dont enjoy game with deep strategy that takes long hours managing your economy just to conquer a small little solar system,all they want is quickie for big flashy bangs. Ressurection of my much craved genre is cast by one of the most unexpected company,iron clad studios.Never heard of it? Me too.They are small and unpopular (no offense),but they pull off a feat that make those huge studios to shame about what game development is all about.
With a interesting opening vid,i was expecting to learn my way to universe domination with single player campaign.To my surprise, there isnt.With my dislike of flipping through pages of manual to learn the game in theory, i spend about 2 hours before getting the hang of this game.Its diffculty is about the level of supreme commander if you need a reference, but seriously for a 4x genre, its rather newbie friendly imo.Once you start getting hold of all its concept,this game is extremely rewarding.Wiping out empires with a armada built with 1 full day worth of playing time is a sense of achievement not offered by FPS or action pack RTS.
This game engine is rather outdated or not to my expectation.It is badly programmed to scale with multi core cpus which result in massive lags during large battle,just like supreme commander.The visuals side is also lagging behind the industry top dogs with poor texture and lack of complicated shaders.But these can be overlooked and ignored by how well it faired in gameplay and how little budget and small studio this game is created from.
It may be the best and only 4x game you see in the entire 2008.Highly recommended unless you suffer from ADHD.

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Phase jump


A scene you will see every 5 hours or more.