Archive for April, 2009
Sword Of The Stars Review
by admin on Apr.11, 2009, under 4X Games
General Overview. SOTS is a 4X game published by Lighthouse Entertainment and designed by Kerberos Productions. The gameplay mostly involves managing your space empire against a number of opponents, and does not focus on individual colony managment. Battles between your forces are conducted on a 3D map, however you can only order your ships to move on two of the dimensions. The main gameplay is in the design of your ships. Weapons are put into banks of turrets, and the weapons are chosen from whichever techs you currently have. Each ship consists of three sections, command, misson, and engine. Your options for design are mainly limited by what the random tech tree grants you, with major implications.
Gameplay. 9.5/10 Innovative, with many options and possibilities. Only downside is that it can eat time like a hungry hog.
Graphics. 8/10 Not Fancy, but will not crush your computer with the weight of a thousand suns.
Execution. 7/10 Amazing AI players, but is prone to crashing on rare occasions.(at least w/o newest patch. Which is kinda hard to find)
Learning Curve. 2.5/10 WAAAYYY, WAAAYYY steep for beginners!!! If you’ve played 4X before, it will not be too hard, but if your beginning, you should proably try an easier game first.
Interface. 8.5/10 Most major options are not on your main screen, but in seperate screens you can call up with hotkeys, like homeworld. When you select something( a planet) it will display many relevent stats without using too much space. Unfortunately, it is not intutitive, and like the rest of the game, will require you to spend alot of time figuring it out. Patches are praticularly important with relation to this.
Replayability. 8/10 Techs are not extremely varied, but the multiple levels of each tech and random tech tree means that you will always be trying to get the next tech in such-and-such tree b/c you’ve seen it once and you want it again.
Overall 7.5/10(Casual) 9/10(Niche) It’s learning curve is too steep for casual play, but if you can overcome that, you can have years and years of fun with this game.
