Demos in Spaaaaaace!

Time once again for one of my sporadic game reviews. Today, we take a look at the demos of Sword of the Stars and Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy.

Sword of the Stars is yet another entry in the 4X space genre, the mother of all 4X games being Masters of Orion (but it wasn't the first by any means). For the purposes of this review, I will do alot of comparison of SoTS and Galactic Civilizations 2 (GalCiv2). Both games are steeped in the classic 4X idioms, but each takes a different direction with each element of gameplay.

The basic idea of course is you chose one of four races in your "galaxy" and start with a homeworld. The idea is to expand your race's influence by exploring neighboring stars and if a suitable planet is found, establishing a colony on that world (more is not always better though). While you are doing this, you can research various technologies which can help in all kinds of things; faster ships, more powerful weapons, better colonies etc. Eventually of course your society will meet up with other races. In some cases, you can establish friendly (or at least non-aggressive) relationships with them, but in most cases fleets clash, ships bleed and fate is tossed like dice in the merciless vacuum of space....

So those are the basics, but the two games handle each aspect very differently. The most pronounced difference of course is that SotS uses a 3D star map (so it's more like real spaaaaaaace!) with GalCiv2's star map is always two dimensional. For those not used to working in 3D, this can be a bit daunting (and confusing) but overall it leads to some interesting strategic play.

Another big difference is the way the two games handle colonies. GalCiv2 has some very detailed colony and financial management: you need to build up each colony with different types of building to give you particular advantages and abilities. SotS uses a very simple colony strategy: planets will have a "compatibility rating" for each race (and it can be different for each race for the same planet). Building a colony is pretty simple: once it's established, it terraforms (makes the world a nicer place for your colonists) builds a generic "infrastructure" which determines income and how much ship-building you can do.

Research is pretty similar for both: there are various "paths" of research that give you bonuses, special abilities etc. While GalCiv2 has a much larger tree (almost redundant in alot of places) SotS has a narrower range, but a technology can have multiple dependencies where GalCiv2 just has simple branching for the most part. Additionally, SotS generates some randomness into the tree: some techs will not be available in some games while others appear only rarely. This adds to the replayability quite a bit. There's also the fact that you never know what technologies will "open" which gives research a certain unpredictability. Of course the demo is pretty limited, so there is more than likely a bigger technology tree to research.

Ships and ship design are very distinct as well. GalCiv2 has a very flexible ship design system which features alot of jewelry that allows you to customize the look of each ship according to taste. Functional design is pretty free-form as well. However the end results are pretty much the same in terms of the game itself: more and better is the name of the game. SotS doesn't have the same flexibility, but in this case it works out to be much cleaner: there are three hull sizes (only on in the demo though). Each hull size has three sections that can be swapped out with pieces that do different jobs. So the end result almost forces a player to play with mixed armaments, while GalCiv2 fleets are usually just multitudes of the same ship.

Combat in GalCiv2 is strictly hands-off (but pretty) as battles resolve without any interference from the player. SotS allows auto resolution, but the player can group and move fleets, assign targets etc. It's in a 2D plane (which is odd considering the star systems are in 3D) which adds a certain edge for a competent player.

Overall the UI is okay, although I think in the attempt to simplify what is on screen, the developers cut out too much. Navigating the statistics and data screens can be a bit difficult to navigate through and the actual universe (your stars and fleets) could use a bit more detail as well. If I have one serious complaint, it's the lack of information on how to play the game, but it's a demo, not a full release.

So in a side-by-side taste test, both games are good but for different reasons: SotS can be played a bit more 'quick and dirty' as opposed to GalCiv2's long, drawn out (but still fun) games. The UI could use alot more polish, but an upcoming patch (to the full game) is being released almost at the same time as the actual game release. Perusing the boards it is available for purchase online (although they are having some problems with the DRM offered by the North American digital distribution). Retail purchase is technically available but most people who have contacted the retails report that they have not shown up in most cases, and in many cases the stores didn't know they actually are selling the game. We'll see how that pans out for them


Next Up: Lego Star Wars: The Original Trilogy

C'mon, Star Wars presented in an all-Lego format and playable on your console and PC? I'm totally geeking out over it!

The original Lego Star Wars covered the the 'prequel' movies, and actually got higher ratings than the movies themselves. Lots of puzzles, action, secret characters and levels, the game has a very high replay value, is slick in presentation, and offers co-op play!

The Original Trilogy demo covered "Chapter 3": Luke and Ben arrive at Mos Eisley and need to sell a speeder while avoiding Storm Troopers, speeder stealing Jawas and the various scum and villains residing in that hive (you know the line). All presented in Brick form.

So if you played the original game, The Original Series seems to be more of the same, but it's a good same, so that's good.

For the record though the controls on a PC are horrid, and there still seems to be no game-controller support. This seems ridiculous as the game is essentially a console game: I don't see how they could not do a port and lose the basic control structures. But hey, I'm not a programmer, so... waitaminute!

I'm hoping that they bundle this with the first Lego Star Wars as I never actually picked that up. The co-op play has me intrigued in particular: finding someone to play co-op is another matter entirely.