Crying Suns

I like the idea of Crying Suns and I've had a few hours of fun for sure. I do wish there was an option for a neutral review, but the negatives are just too loud in every playthrough so I must thumb this down to make people aware of them. Positives: +A roguelite with solid fundamentals. You go from system to system, gather allies and upgrades for your ship, destroy enemies, and resolve small story events. +A fresh RTS hexagonal-grid form of combat. +Pixel art with well made shaders. The effect of going from planet to planet makes the camera smoothly swoosh from one planet or space signal to the other. It's a well made effect that seems to have some good effort put into it and really sells the idea of being the commander of a space ship. Negatives: -The writing is so, so, so bad. It would not be such a problem unless you weren't constantly reminded of it. No matter who you speak to, whether it's your crew, civilians, pirates, religious fanatics, elite troopers, or mobsters - they all share the same type of forced ditzy millennial personality of varying degrees. There's a low effort to make characters feel unique and in-character, because they often use the same form of speech you'd expect from a 2018 Twitter post. Jarring and repulsive. -While the combat is fresh, the balancing is not. The playstyle of the second ship you unlock revolves around squishy suicide drones that deal damage when destroyed. Cool, but it's way too strong. Mounted guns are weak, have high cooldown, and do very little. The only really decent ones are those that can target the other ship (most cannot, why?) and they are few and far inbetween to find. -Every chapter goes through different quadrants with different enemies. Supposedly. Random events repeat themselves, even those that are tied to a specific faction. So you not only find them again, but outside the quadrant they're canonically supposed to be in, for example, a pirate story event in church space. This begs the question of the meaning of the local faction hunting you, are they really that protective of their quadrant or is it just a thin convenient way to push you forward? You will likely not regret playing this for a few hours if you got it on a sale. I did and they can take my money, it's whatever. Will I play this to the end though? Doubtful, unless on a rainy day with nothing else to do.

Punishes the player for restarting by locking them out of meta-progression unlocks.

A fun premise and seemingly interesting game loop. Unfortunately, you are given the illusion of choice rather than real ones; events quickly become repetitive(saw the same event two systems back to back), you are given choices that railroad into combat, and while the plot is interesting at first it really fell off at the end.

I want to like this game, I really do... but the mechanics baffle me. The enemy, especially bosses, can send out endless waves of squadrons, endlessly, without them ever dying. You kill them over and over again, and they just send them out again. Your squadrons, on the other hand, if they die twice, they're perma-dead. Having a ship weapon seems fairly useless since it takes forever to fire, does no damage (and I am not talking about the support weapons that do no damage, I'm talking about the weapons that deal damage), and doesn't help you very much against the squadrons. It literally seems like the best strategy is just mass Boomer drones and you win. If they die, they explode and kill everything else around them. Then you send them out again and repeat. I understand this is a "Rogue-like" where you are supposed to die time after time and learn and get better, but when the enemy can cheat to win, it does not help you get better. It just shows you that they put you in hopeless situations so you can die and do it over again.

Anybody who is a big fan of the roguelite genre knows how tedious it can be to play a bad FTL-copycat with less than interesting combat and progression. This game chose to be a glorified Visual Novel that uses a bad FTL-copycat as the interlude between the lore dumps and discussions. Just from this premise, you know it will not be a good mix because the FTL gameplay requires to be able to play fast and restart fast, because you can die at any time from taking a bad route. Does the narrative aspect at least save the game? Well maybe it could have done it if it had been written and delivered by an adult author whose culture didn't solely reference videogames, cartoons and american television. The scifi is very banal, the characters caricatural, and the incessant attempts at adolescent humour will get on your nerves pretty fast. Most of the NPCs talk to you like teenagers talking to their dad. Every dialog is a long seance of click-through, it sometimes takes up to three clicks to just validate a dialog choice, the author also loves to intersperse his dialog panels with pointless transitions, sounds, and even fades-to-black between panels. The only part of the game I can say good things about is the animation, which carries the narrative a little bit and offers some pretty cool effects, in a mix of lowpoly 3D and pixel art. Unfortunately the pixelart is made in this ugly wokiefornian hipster pixelart style where every character looks like a hippy or a drifter with very thin legs. The combat is horrid and happens a bit too often for my taste. Unlike FTL, there are no real tactics or strategies, besides buying all the weapons and squadrons that you can and hoping that it will be enough. By the second chapter you'll be letting out a groan every time a new battle starts because it feels like a chore playing this repetitive, ersatz of FTL combat that always happens the same way. At one point, just after a long difficult combat, the game thought it would be funny to statr a new combat immediately with the previous pirate's sister, that's when I decided I didn't have time for this ♥♥♥♥. By the way, I noticed something interesting from the achievements stats: 69% of players beat the first chapter boss (which is a lot for a Steam game) BUT only 43% of players got the achievement for dying during a run. What does that mean? the game is not easy enough that you can complete the three chapters on your first run without dying. So that means A LOT of players got so bored that they quit before even losing a run. [h1](follow my curator page [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/33882793/]GenXPlayers[/url] for more retro and indie reviews)[/h1]

it's FTL-like, but not FTL good. More lore, more conversations where intel is drip fed painfully. Pro writer tip..."Show. don't tell" What's worse is the game knows that it's doing this. You have a NPC guide who in every conversation has options "remind me what the mcguffin is?" But that's fluff, at the core this game has a broken main gameplay loop. Because the maingame play loop is NOT hex-based tactical rock-paper-scissors combat...no the main gameplay loop is skipping conversation and moving from point A ot point B looking for space combat missions.

Hey ... who gave this game mixed reviews? That's nonsense, this game is astonishing. It's like FTL, in a way, if FTL had more of a story. If you don't love it, you're doing it wrong :p =)

It's like FTL, except that FTL combat is fun. The ship combat in this game was just plain annoying to me.

Basically no meta progression, so a lot of the time losses feel pointless and punishing with no forward momentum. In fact, specialist officers (special crew with more skills and expertise) are put on cool down after death which makes it feel even worse. You also don't have any lasting affect on the world when you die, even though the narrative framing is that you're a bunch of clones going to the same place over and over. It'd be nice if runs were easier to start because you'd cleared sectors out or made allies who were willing to support you. "Oh captain Idaho, nice to see you again. Here's some scrap as thanks for clearing out those pirate ships." It's also a shame clearing sectors of their bosses doesn't really have much impact on you or the story. You spend all this time patrolling a sector killing pirates and helping colonies only to skip town and never think about them again. You get a new ship, but that's not even acknowledged in the story and the ships aren't really upgrades they're more like classes. Maybe something isn't clicking for me but the combat can really feel like it will snowball on you without many tools to address it. I had a really solid run in Chap III with a Church Ship. I had a glut of high level ships and weapons, lots of upgrades, more officers than I could carry. Yet during the final battle the enemy fighters were out DPSing my frigates, leaving me scrambling to throw everything at killing them while I tried to get some time to breathe and throw fire at the enemy ship. I put up a good fight, but then I lost and was right back to less than nothing which felt pretty bad. The narrative has a good hook, but I got caught up in chapter III banging my head against a wall and don't really want to continue as of right now. Perhaps in the future I'll pick it up again, but I just don't feel like the game has enough for me to get super invested.

Great game with interesting choices and rewarding meta progression. A great story to boot. Highly recommend if you are a fan of the genre.