Sins of a Solar Empire review

A couple months ago, something (I think it was the short story collection, The New Space Opera that I picked up) started me off on a huge space/sci-fi kick. I started playing Homeworld: Cataclysm for the fourth or fifth time and actually finished it this time (much to my pleasure; I reviewed it here), played a week or so of EVE Online, and even tried out the original Galactic Civilizations to see if I like it any better than the sequel, which to me had somehow failed as a successor to Master of Orion II. Despite everyone and their mother seeming to love that game, I could never get into it or, apparently, its prequel.

Recently, my lust for space adventure is being slaked by been Sins of a Solar Empire. It bills itself as a "RT4X" game, melding the more traditional RTS with the typically turn-based "4X" games, including the aforementioned MoO2, the GalCiv games, and to a great extent, Sid Meier's Civ offerings. I remember how skeptical I was when I read the first preview of Sins and its plans to meld the strengths of 4X games with a real-time model, but somehow, they pulled it off, and they did a damn good job of it.

I'll get the technical bits out of the way first. The game's sound is pretty good; the sound effects range from classic pew pew lasers to one or two that I actually recognize from Starcraft (one unit makes me think I'm landing or lifting off Terran structures every time I click on it). Sins' unit voices range from the standard to the mildly hilarious - while the human TEC are your standard vocal fare, the voices of the sibilant-heavy Vasari are akin to classically campy insectoid or reptilian aliens from old sci-fi, which I think is exactly what the creators were going for, and it worked. The Vasari especially sound a bit absurd at times, but it's more charming than annoying. The music ranges from serene string tracks to war marches very suitable to the game's deliberately just-over-the-top feel. In a way, the music is the best part of Sins' sound, since it switches tracks based on what you're viewing and what's happening on-screen. The warlike songs come up when you're looking at a battle, and the calmer tracks start up as you view a peaceful planet, etc. It's a minor thing but it's a nice touch; I really hope that eventually they'll release a jukebox-type mod that will allow us to queue up our own music and tag them for context-appropriate playing, as the music just doesn't have the same punch after a few hours of playing.

The graphics and visuals are quite nice, I have to say. The planets, which can make or break a space game's visual appeal, look quite good, and while the default stars look less than stellar, they have a very nice effect to simulate the shifting of a star's corona. The interstellar backdrop to maps leaves a little to be desired, but not every space background can, or should, look like the ones from Homeworld. The ships generally look good, and each race has a distinct visual style that's pretty consistent across its ships. Nothing is jaw-droppingly beautiful (though several mods are making great strides towards high-rez textures), but this is actually the game's greatest graphical strength. The game's graphics can be scaled across a large range, making the game play quite smoothly even on older machines, including my own. Currently I'm finding a balance between mid-range graphics and the inevitable FPS lag that occurs during larger battles, but Sins' graphical scaling is a great feature.

I keep trying to come up with some way to fill in the blank so I can say "At heart, Sins is really a _______ game." But I can't really figure out which side of the RTS vs. 4X fence Sins sits on. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty genuine hybrid. Certain elements of the gameplay lean towards both design templates.

The fundamentals of gameplay will be familiar to anyone who's played a game in either genre, really. On most maps, you start with a single planet, a couple established mines (most astronomical entities have orbiting asteroids from which you can mine Crystal or Metal, the two non-Credit resources in Sins), and a frigate factory, which can make a few basic ship types. From this power base you expand your territory as you build up an ever-larger fleet, research new technologies, and tear holes in enemy ships with lasers, plasma bursts, and autocannons. That much is all pretty standard.

The interesting things begin to come out when you realize that on larger maps (and anything smaller than a one-star large map won't be very interesting after you get a halfway decent feel for the game), you're going to be dealing with potentially dozens of planets, multiple large fleets and defense garrisons, and upwards of half a dozen individual star systems. All in real time. It's extremely daunting, but Ironclad (Sins' developer) came up with a series of features that make it not just manageable, but easy.

The first of these, while arguably not directly a boon to UI friendliness, is the map setup. Each map is divided up in X number of star systems (the game makes the common mistake of labeling everything as a "solar system," a term which technically only applies to the one orbiting our own sun, but it's a very minor thing). Each star system is separate within the map, and can only be reached once certain technologies are researched. "Orbiting" each star are a number of planets, colonizeable asteroids, gas giants, wormholes, and other astronomical bodies. Each of these has a gravity well, where all the fighting and building and such occurs, and these are in turn connected by phase lanes. Phase lanes are the traversable paths between gravity wells, and they provide a kind of "terrain" (along with limited choke points) that keeps colonies from being entirely indefensible. The playing field is also effectively limited to a 2D plane; z-axis movement is quite possible but its strategic value is limited. While this removes a lot of tactical possibility, it also makes things easier to manage. Basically, the way the maps are set up keeps players from being overwhelmed by too may potential attack vectors and movement possibilities.

Another thing that keeps the player sane in the face of all this real-time responsibility is, simply put, the pacing of the game. Everything, from resource collection to research occurs at a fairly slow pace. Some might find this annoying, but it's necessary for the game to be playable. Even at its highest speed settings, ships can take several minutes to phase jump between planets, and for most ships moving across a gravity well can take equally as long (there's also the cool sidenote that ships moving toward a planet move faster than those moving away). Combat is similarly paced, with even a lopsided battle lasting several minutes. Primarily, what this means is that you could be upgrading several new colonies, ordering more frigates from your shipyards, and commanding two or three large fleet engagements at the same time, all without actually being too stressed about it. It does all add up, but compared to the micromanagement fests like Warcraft III, Sins is positively stately. A neat side-effect of the combat's pacing is that you can actually make an effective retreat. I've seriously never played an RTS before where this was reasonably possible, and god is it nice. If you're getting overwhelmed, you can usually hold out long enough to either run away or warp in some reinforcements. It actually makes it more strategic than tactical, which is a nice change of pace.

And when you can't quite keep up or don't want to spare the attention for a minor skirmish, the unit AI and autoattack/autocasting will handle it quite well. The autocasting deserves a special shout-out, far outdoing the feature's appearance in most other strategy games I can think of (and it's necessary, considering how many units have special abilities).

The two biggest reason Sins' large scale works are the zoom feature, and the Empire Tree. The zoom feature is pretty self-explanatory: via the mouse wheel or a trio of hotkeys, you can go from a close-up of a single ship to an overview of the entire star system. This is VITAL. You could easily play the entire game from the zoomed-out view, though that would hardly be as fun. The point is, you could. Conversely, you could also play the whole game from a fairly zoomed-in perspective, thanks to the Empire Tree. This transparent sidebar replaces the minimap most RTS's require to effectively represent the playing field. On it, your colonies, fleets, and points of engagement are all represented symbolically. You can select planets, issue orders to buildings and ships through it, and really do pretty much anything you would need to.

All these factors add up to a smooth, fun gameplay experience. If the game lacked any one of these features and UI innovations, the whole thing could buckle under its own ambition, but Ironclad pulled it off, and damn does it make me happy.

As a footnote, I should mention that the game doesn't have any campaign mode (it has a fully fleshed-out singleplayer mode, though). A lot of people, both reviewers and forum QQers, seem to think that this is a flaw. The developers basically said "this is not a standard RTS; no one's has every complained about Civilization or Master of Orion not having a campaign, why bitch now?" As much as I agree with this, though, a little part of me can't help but want a campaign storyline. I think that a big part of the call for a campaign is that Sins of a Solar Empire has a cast of surprisingly well fleshed-out races. Each is unique and has a lot more backstory and character than most 4X game races do. I think that I, and probably others as well, are reacting to this and a desire for more interesting story when they ask for an admittedly superfluous single-player campaign.