I quite liked the first Sword of the Stars and looked forward to the second one but of course its botched launch is now the stuff of legend. Most players considered it to be unplayable. But Kerberos continued patching and adding content to it. A while back I bought the latest Enhanced Edition at a deep discount since I’d heard that it is now considered to be in a playable state. I only just recently had the time to take it for a spin. The results were unimpressive.
- Let’s start with the poor production values and overall glitchy feel the game still has. Apparently the introduction cinematics were taken out some time back. The button for it still exists on the main menu but it’s been greyed out. If you really want to watch it you’re meant to go over to YouTube. Despite many complaints, user interface design is still extremely confusing and unintuitive, which can be seen even from the game setup screens when you choose the game’s settings and decide which player slot you want to control.
- Then there’s the general slowness. Turn processing feels sluggish. There are even discernible pauses when you switch between screens and viewing modes in the strategic view. Clicking on buttons feels laggy. Controls in the ship design feel strange and unreliable. For example if you have chosen a weapon system as the primary weapon and make a change elsewhere in the ship, the choice of primary weapon changes inexplicably. The game works, yes, but it feels like it’s being held together by spit and polish.
- The game’s design feels unrefined and poorly thought out too. There are a ton of details in the simulation but a lot of it feels like busy work that is either irrelevant in the big picture sense or just plain very cumbersome to work out. For example, it is very difficult to work out how one weapon performs differently from another. The game provides you with charts to help you compare things like damage and accuracy over various distances, but the charts are tiny and hard to decipher. There’s a weapons testing mode in which you can have your newly designed ship shoot at stationery targets. But without damage and accuracy statistics, this mode tells you nothing except for the fields of fire of the various weapon emplacements on the ship.
- Here’s another silly design decision. There’s a bar that lets you control security spending. If your government spends more in general, you need to raise this too or some of the cash is wasted as corruption. Fortunately the game tells you where the ideal position for the security spending bar is. So the question is: why even force the player to have to manually adjust it every now and then to make corruption zero or make it all happen under the hood? It’s pure nonsense. There’s also a bar that allocates funds on a per planet basis to either producing trade goods or producing ships. Fine, right? Except that when you’re not producing ships, the system is too dumb to automatically put everything into trade goods. I give up.
- The real-time combat, long the main draw of this series, is great fun when ships actually get to fight even though the controls are somewhat finicky and trying to get your ships to stay in formation is a real pain. The problem is that most of the time, you’re not fighting. I must have spent ages having my little flotilla of ships hunting around the map looking for enemies and just when I’ve found them, oops, time’s up. Then there are the frustrating moments when the game tries to simulate pointless fights. It appears that if you choose to manually a control a fight then you must manually control all subsequent fights, even silly ones in which your lone freighter is attacked by pirates. It’s pure frustration.
I could go on and on but what’s the point? The game certainly is playable and it never once crashed on me. But it’s also utterly unfun due to the idiotic design decisions and painful user interface. Add that to poor documentation and feedback on player actions, and you can understand why most people are still not recommending it. When you start using a technology, there’s always the niggling feeling that it’s not working correctly because it wasn’t fully implemented yet and so forth. Given the wealth of good games out there, I just can’t see any reason to put up with this. Sorry.
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