Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

When I first heard about Sins Of A Solar Empire (soase) I was quite excited. In my opinion the space combat RTS genre is fairly underrated and has allot of potential. Soase manages to tap most of this potential in a way we haven't seen in a while.

Factions:
The game has three factions which aren't hugely distinct from each other besides their looks. The real difference between factions is only noticeable in their tech trees and capital ship abilities. Especially the tech trees are huge and will at first be a bit overwhelming. The amount of ships available for you to build is just enough. At some points especially on larger maps I had the idea that a couple more specialized ships would have been nice. However on the flipside it does mean that you can easily learn the strengths and weaknesses of each ship meaning you can deploy them as effective as possible.

Size and Scope:
The maps in the game come in three sizes: small, medium and large. Even the smallest 1v1 aimed map already has 7 planets on it, larger maps encompass several star systems with on some maps more then 30 planets. These huge maps makes games last for ages. The smallest premade map took me 2,5 hours to complete which makes me guess playing the largest map can take up to several days.
The great thing about soase is that no matter how long the game takes it manages to keep it interesting. There's never a dull moment and you'll always have something to do whether that's upgrading your planets, researching technology or expanding your fleet.

Looks and sounds:
Soase looks quite nice, nothing jaw dropping but simply nice. The menu and user interface both look very sleek adding up to the total picture. The sound is really nothing out of the extraordinary either. The music sounds just fine and has enough variety to keep it enjoyable and not give you the feeling that the same music is playing over and over again during longer sessions. The unit voices are a bit stereo typical in some cases but are well done nonetheless.

Difficulty:
Sadly the game only offers 4 small tutorials which don't even explain each aspect of the game. This means there are several functions which you'll need to figure out yourself. All this adds up to quite a steep learning curve. I consider myself quite the RTS veteran but I had allot trouble beating an easy enemy in my first game.

No campaign wtf ?
Besides the rather steep learning curve, overall difficulty the game has one last downside which comes in the form of a missing campaign. It really seems Ironclad missed the boat here because all three factions have interesting background stories which seem an excellent starting ground for a story based campaign.
The game does however have a large selection of premade maps available and an easy to use map creator which all adds up to a huge replay value.

Concluding:
All in all soase is an amazing game with an impressive scope that will keep you tangled behind your PC for hours on end. It might not tap the full potential of space rts but it's the best game in this genre since Homeworld.

9.0
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Lone_Warrior_666