Crying Suns

This is a tactical game with 3 major modes:

1. a star-system level map where you decide where to move
2. a ship's bridge view where you interact with random events and move around within a star system
3. a battle mode between two battleships.

You wander the galaxy, exploring a series of randomly generated star clusters, and experience an evolving story as you go along.

THE GOOD:

• The game's pixel graphics are the most impressive I've ever seen. The ships, planets, and stars are really cool-looking. The art makes amazing use of 3D, bright, and dark. Wow!
• Really fantastic and unique music that is very atmospheric.
• The story is captivating up until the ending. It's overall a good cyberpunk plot—high-tech, low-life—with a central theme of the human dependence on technology and how technological advances benefit the rich but not the poor.
• The story has really good plot twists that keep moving the goal post in interesting ways.
• The ship-to-ship battles are engaging and interesting for the most part.

THE BAD:

• Crying Suns is advertised as a Rogue-like game but it isn't really. In principle, a Rogue-like should be played over and over with you learning the environment, enemies, resources, abilities, etc. and making it further each play-through thanks to your increased skill, or unlocked abilities. Instead, the game has an evolving story split into chapters, and you have to restart a chapter if you die. This is just a standard linear storyline with save points. If you're looking for a Rogue-like, you will be sorely disappointed.
• The star maps are randomly generated and offer very limited opportunity for navigation. There is little to learn about the lay of the land, so little opportunity to gain expertise or make meaningful strategic choices.
• The random encounter events offer very little freedom of choice. They usually give you a tiny handful of pre-scripted options, and often randomly decide how things will turn out without any way for you to ensure success or mitigate losses. Basically, how the event goes is about the story-writer's choices and not about your choices.
• For example, let's say you encounter a mysteriously abandoned ship. The story-writer decides you can only send 4 troops over, no more, no less. You send them, and the game decides it was an ambush and all 4 troops die. Why didn't you have the choice to do something else? Blow up the ship? Send a specialist to scout it out? Send more troops so you would win? Etc. etc. I feel this is a major lost opportunity to allow the player to learn from experience, marshal their resources, and apply effective tactics to maximize their gains. For a game that does this correctly, see the excellent Death Road to Canada.
• The away missions to the planet have a similar lack of freedom. All you can do is decide which specialist to send. You can't decide to send more troops, fewer troops, more specialists, or anything else really.
• There's a lack of strategic depth to the skirmishes. The fighting was difficult to understand at first, but once I found a dominating strategy the game never introduced any opponents that forced me to adopt a different strategy.
• I never died and thus never restarted a chapter even once. In spite of that, the game ran out of new random events long before the ending. Some random events happened three or four times! There could have been more variety here.
• I thought the ending was lame: a forced machine singularity god-intelligence and the inevitable destruction of humankind. All the suggested end choices were bad. I don't believe that human beings could ever be made so helpless. Where were the smart options, like creating a democracy, or freeing the machines and working alongside each other? Humans are really much more capable of survival, and dependence on technology makes us strong, not weak.

THE UGLY:

• Conversation Bug: I asked a character where the sector boss was and they said at end of cluster... which was literally next door!
• Conversation Bug: several events had my character saying they'd come back to life again, but I had never died!
• There seems to be a problem with the Neo-N rolls where they virtually never go above 1.
• Graphics Bug: when sending away missions to a planet or doing intra-stellar travel the ships frequently travel through solid objects.