Sins of a Solar Empire

[Navaros]

Tried out this one because it seems to be getting near unanimous praise from end-users as a good game.

I never played a 4X game before. So maybe "I'm just not getting it" in regards to the content of this post so feel free to take it with a grain of salt, but here's my impressions so far. Since I do not know anything about 4X games, I do not consider my opinions in this post to be an informed one.

So far I've only did the Basic Gameplay tutorial. Not liking the graphics. I've read comments such as that this game has "great graphics", but based on having played all of the Basic Gameplay tutorial, I certainly ain't seeing that to be true. Quite the opposite, it seems. A few months ago I was playing Star Wars: Empire at War, which was a game released in February 2006 that seems to have similar space combat dynamics, and it seems to me like that might have a lot better graphics than SoASE does. Even Empire at War didn't have very good graphics, but it still looks a lot better to me than those in SoASE. To me the SoASE graphics look circa 1997ish.

I definitely believe the official blurb as stated on the game description on metacritic "They must then test their mettle on a 3D tactical battlefield, where their ships will fight it out in stunning visual glory" is a lie. Maybe sucky graphics are a necessary part of 4X games for technical reasons, I wouldn't know. I do know the graphics are very hard on my eyes though, and don't look at all comparable to other standard PC games released in 2008.

At first I didn't get what happened in the "Basic Gameplay" tutorial. It told me to colonize some asteroids and I did. Then it said that "buildings will be covered in another tutorial" . But it didn't make it clear if that was supposed to be the end of the tutorial I was in right then or not. There was an enemy scout ship nearby that was invulnerable to damage after my fleet was firing on it for over 10 minutes. Seemed to be no way to progress in the tutorial. I started the tutorial a couple of more times and the same thing happened.

Finally on my third or fourth try going throught the tutorial, the tutorial messages kept progressing beyond the "buildings will be covered in another tutorial" message that it kept getting stuck at, which magically made the scout ship change from invulnerable to vulnerable, and I was able to finish the tutorial. The oddest part is that some tutorial messages have an "OK" button to click on to progress to the next message, and some don't. But there was no "OK" button on the "buildings will be covered in another tutorial" message it gets stuck on.

Didn't like that the cap ship seemed really small. Not epic at all, which is what I was expecting after reading it's a cap ship-based game. I don't see how playing the game would get me excited about my cap ships and cap ship battles, seeing as they are so puny. By extension, I don't see why combat in general would be fun since the other ships are even way more puny than the puny cap ships are.

I also didn't like that there didn't seem to be any way to increase the text size of the interface.

The sound was disappointing me too. I found the trademark Star Wars laser blip sounds in Empire at War to be much more satisfying. Hearing SoASE's muted machinegun type sounds during combat is very unfulfilling hard on my ears after having played Empire at War.

I tried playing the next tutorial a bit, the buildings one, but I got really bored with all the technical jargon and dry activities it was describing for me to do, and then exited out of the game. I was getting the impression like this might be at it's core moreso of a spreadsheet number-crunching kind of thing rather than a gameplay-based game. Which might be what is expected of a 4X game, I wouldn't know.