Game Review: Sins of a Solar Empire
Andrew Scagnelli
Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: Opinion
Newcomer Ironclad Entertainment recently released "Sins of a Solar Empire," a sprawling real-time strategy (RTS) game that includes many gameplay conventions of the "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate," or 4X, genre.
At first glance, "Sins" looks mostly like the "Homeworld" series of games, one of the few RTS series to take advantage of all 3 dimensions, due to the games sharing an outer-space setting. Unlike most other RTS games, however, "Sins" focuses very heavily on its technology tree, requiring players to spend significant amounts of game time and resources on research. "Sins" also introduces a new idea to both genres in the "Pirates" faction, an independent faction that can be "contracted" every fifteen minutes to attack one player, with a frenzied auction leading up to each attack as each side pours money into avoiding an attack.
Unfortunately, for all its great ideas and impeccable balance, "Sins" falters by dragging an average match over a number of hours. While genre-standard RTS games such as "WarCraft 3" and "StarCraft" limit their skirmishes to approximately one hour, a "quick" round of "Sins" can easily stretch to two or three hours with no end in sight. While the game does periodically save in multiplayer, and allows resuming with all original players present, such a feature is extremely hard to take advantage of due to real life commitments from all parties. Even worse, the early portion of each game is horrifically boring, with little to do but explore, avoid skirmishes with more entrenched races and watch as resources slowly pile up for research or construction. Even worse, there is no single player mode beyond skirmish maps.
"Sins" is a very good game, in technical terms. It looks good, sounds good and plays fair. These positive features are wasted on gameplay that simply runs far too slowly to be fun. If you can find a group that has the time to spend on such a long game, it can be very rewarding. For those who cannot, it is a complete failure.
At first glance, "Sins" looks mostly like the "Homeworld" series of games, one of the few RTS series to take advantage of all 3 dimensions, due to the games sharing an outer-space setting. Unlike most other RTS games, however, "Sins" focuses very heavily on its technology tree, requiring players to spend significant amounts of game time and resources on research. "Sins" also introduces a new idea to both genres in the "Pirates" faction, an independent faction that can be "contracted" every fifteen minutes to attack one player, with a frenzied auction leading up to each attack as each side pours money into avoiding an attack.
Unfortunately, for all its great ideas and impeccable balance, "Sins" falters by dragging an average match over a number of hours. While genre-standard RTS games such as "WarCraft 3" and "StarCraft" limit their skirmishes to approximately one hour, a "quick" round of "Sins" can easily stretch to two or three hours with no end in sight. While the game does periodically save in multiplayer, and allows resuming with all original players present, such a feature is extremely hard to take advantage of due to real life commitments from all parties. Even worse, the early portion of each game is horrifically boring, with little to do but explore, avoid skirmishes with more entrenched races and watch as resources slowly pile up for research or construction. Even worse, there is no single player mode beyond skirmish maps.
"Sins" is a very good game, in technical terms. It looks good, sounds good and plays fair. These positive features are wasted on gameplay that simply runs far too slowly to be fun. If you can find a group that has the time to spend on such a long game, it can be very rewarding. For those who cannot, it is a complete failure.