We are in a 4X renaissance of sorts.  After a Dark Age brought on by that gaming plague known as Master of Orion 3, some excellent titles have been released.  For a genre filled with plenty of tried and true (and tired) game mechanics, Sword of the Stars dares to be different.  While different isn’t always better, we must give this game props for breaking the mold.

My God!  It’s full of stars.

It’s still a 4X game, so there is plenty of exploring, expanding, exploiting, and exterminating to go around.  But you’ll get tossed more than a few curve balls when you start digging around in Sword of the Stars.  Once you’ve decided among the four difference races in the game, you’ll be dropped off on your homeworld in a massive galaxy of stars, planets, and a host of nasty little surprises.  From there, you’ll go about your business researching new technologies, designing and building ship, and expanding your galactic empire.

Due to some interesting design choices, Sword of the Stars appears to simultaneously work for and against the player.  There’s plenty of stuff we really like.  The game is clearly designed to take much of the tedium normally found in games like this. 

Galactic Goodness

Many familiar elements like planetary development have been streamlined to make running an empire of dozens of world painless.  Once a world is colonized, your people will automatically go about terraforming it and building up an infrastructure (at your monetary expense).  Simple sliders allow you to allocate more or fewer funds to these endeavors.  At first this feels limiting, but the razor sharp focus of this game is clearly on conquering the galaxy, not building 50 unique buildings on a 100 different planets. Your economy is also blissfully easy to understand and manage thanks to simple little pie chart that updates in real-time as you change your funding levels.

Though focused and free of a lot of extraneous content, Sword of the Stars is by no means a simplistic game.  Ship designs prove to have a remarkable amount of depth.  And thanks to a nicely designed interface, they are a pleasure to tinker around with.

The developers took a chance with the concept of a slightly randomized technology tree and it pays off wonderfully.  Most core technologies are always available, so you won’t be screwed from the start, but the possibility of not having access to your favorite weapon upgrade forces the player to constantly explore alternate strategies.  For players who love everything randomized (count me in) the tech tree here makes Sword of the Stars feel fresh after multiple playthroughs.

Clicking is a Drag

Yet it’s odd to encounter an interface that’s so effective in one instance be so impenetrable in another.  The main strategic interface is fairly functional, but because the galactic map is portrayed as a 3-dimensional space, managing you planets or even just navigating around is a chore.  You’ll be doing lots of clicking on planets to re-center the map, and then either zooming in or out to see either important information, like planet name and fleet locations, or just to get a sense of where you want to go next.  The 3D map makes it far to difficult to visually judge distances without mousing over each and every planet in your vicinity.  This is definitely a case where 3D is not your friend.

The biggest disappointment in the game comes from the tactical combat.  The combat mechanics appear to work well enough, but controlling a fleet of any reasonable size is made overly difficult by an interface that is unhelpful and contradictory.  Unlike the strategic map that uses a double left-click to focus the map on an object, on the battle map you use a single click of the mousewheel.

Impenetrable Interface

The command interface for your ships is a row buttons with circles, dashes, and dots.  Even when you finally figure all of this stuff out, we encountered times when a ship simply wouldn’t follow orders.  There’s also a good chance you won’t notice that your weapons systems will be set at “hold fire” when you first encounter an alien race giving them a few moments to tear you a new one before you realize that your ship aren’t firing back.  And once again, the 3D map appears to actively hinder your ability to understand and control the situation.

Perhaps worst of all, there is no way to resign from a battle you’re clearly losing.  In some cases, like when a meteor shower or some mysterious force engages an undefended planet, you are forced to sit around and literally do nothing for 3 or 4 minutes while the “battle” plays out.  There’s no way around this.  You may as well alt-tab out and check your email.

Butter Knife of the Stars

There’s a lot to like in Sword of the Stars.  The races behave in unique, meaningful ways and we really appreciate the attempt to minimize the strategic tedium.  That’s why it’s so strange to see a game that is clearly trying hard to attract new players to the genre come up with an interface that is at time incredibly hostile.  Can it be addressed in a patch?  Maybe.  For now, X-Play recommends Sword of the Stars with reservation.

Article by: Greg Bemis
Video produced by: Tim Jennings