Sword of the Stars

Rating Everyone Genre real time strategy Publisher Lighthouse Interactive External Links Official Sword fo the Stars Website

Fighting addiction is a difficult thing. You think you have it kicked. You think you're over it. You're clean. You've finally got that monkey off your back. Then an old friend walks up and offers you a hit. Your begin to sweat. Your hands shake and your mouth waters as your friend places a small box in them, his face covered in a knowing grin. Everything after that is a blur--a whirlwind of hedonism, bar fights, fast women, and thermonuclear explosions. Finally you wake up beaten and hung over, your life in shambles, and not knowing how you came to be lying here in this alley. You also realize that you have to be at work in fifteen minutes.

That pretty much describes handing this game to me.

For those of you that are here to just get a rating and not listen to me wax poetic like a lovesick English major, let me give you the Reader’s Digest version: This game is awesome. It is so awesome it will ruin your life. It's like unleashing a dozen ninja and a dozen cowboys hyped up on speed to battle to the death inside your mind. Also, the ninja are on fire. I realize that doesn't make sense, but once this game has robbed you also of precious sleep and left your social life a desiccated husk, you will understand.

Now, for those of you still with me, let's start with some background. Sword of the Stars is a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) space strategy simulator put out by Lighthouse Interactive. It was developed by Kerberos Productions, which was formed a few years back by ex-employees of Rockstar Vancouver, formerly Barking Dog studios. You may recognize their former studio from Homeworld: Cataclysm (or de_train in Counter Strike, but I digress). If you know anything about the Homeworld franchise, then you can already see the Barking Dog connection gives Sword of the Stars a hell of a pedigree. Get it? Dog? Pedigree? ... Yeah, I need sleep. But a pedigree alone isn't enough to get you somewhere in the strategy genre. 4X games have a long and proud history stretching almost all the way back to the beginning of computer gaming.

The genre has been defined for so long by powerhouse dynasties like Master of Orion, Civilization and Galactic Civilizations that I cannot give an honest review without a few passing references to the games that have come before. With that, please forgive me my momentary indulgences in nostalgia. The primary goal of Sword of the Stars is to ensure that your race flourishes throughout the galaxy. The most obvious way for you to make perfectly sure this happens is to eliminate the other races. Of course, those of you of the hippy persuasion can team up with other species to annihilate cooperatively. The main portion of the game is spent settling planets and shepherding their growth from simple colonies to thriving civilizations. Of course, the other races are trying to do the same thing, in their own alien ways.

One of this game's several departures from tradition is the number of races: four; Humanity, the reptilian Tarkas, the insectoid Hivers, and the cetean Liir. By comparison, the original Master of Orion had ten playable races. This lack of racial diversity, however, turns out to be a good thing. In most 4X games, the differences between factions are almost superficial. In Sword of the Stars, completely different “laws of physics” apply to each race. This makes playing, or playing against each race a new and very different experience. As an example, Humanity accomplishes interstellar travel via what they call a "Node Drive", which allows super-luminal travel between stars along fracture lines in space-time. Other races can completely bypass the "node line" system. The Liir, for instance, use a stutter drive that essentially makes constant, miniscule hyperspace "jumps", phasing their ships momentarily out of real space, providing incredible speeds in deep space but becoming sluggish near stars. The Tarkas have the equivalent of "warp" drive, a FTL drive that provides constant, reliable speeds regardless of location. The Hivers initially spread via sublight speed, but can establish "gates" between star systems that allow for instantaneous travel between any two gates, allowing every Hiver colony to essentially be adjacent to every other Hiver colony.

In addition to making aliens actually "feel" alien via the different FTL systems, Kerberos also made an effort to lower the learning curve of the game and reduce micromanagement by simplifying colony upkeep. Sword of the Stars boils down your colony controls into three priorities: terraforming, infrastructure, and ship-building. These are represented via sliders and the colonists on your planet allocate their resources as you specify. Your empire's finances are controlled similarly with a slider that moves between "savings" and "research". Where your money goes is represented by a convenient nearby pie chart. This simplification may go a little too far, as later in the game I found myself with nothing interesting to do for five to ten turn stretches on occasion.

In older games, an experienced player pretty much had the research trees memorized. They knew which technologies to research when to make dominating the galaxy child's play. Research trees make an appearance in Sword of the Stars, but they are turned on their ears by the introduction of randomness. A technology that is available in one play through the game may not be available at all in future games, or may have different pre-reqs. This means each game is a new challenge to an experienced player, as they cannot necessarily depend on the technology for their favorite strategies.

Ships are put together via three pieces (Command, Mission, Drive) which combine to define a ship's role and capabilities. Once the body of the ship is picked, then the user gets to decide on turret-by-turret basis which weapons to mount on it. Each turret actually has it's own firing arc that must be considered by designers in addition to obvious attributes such as range, damage, accuracy, and refire rate. The editor doesn't give you much in the way of aesthetic options, but huge beam cannons do have an aesthetic value all of their own. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any way to refit existing vessels to newer designs. Having dozens of nearly unarmored destroyers with the future equivalent of a pop-gun floating around my planets while new ships roll off the assembly lines with mega death rays is kind of a bummer.

Combat is handled in real-time, with 3D ships maneuvering on a 2D plane, trying to bring their weapons to bear on enemy targets. The ability of turrets to rotate as well as the several overlapping arcs of fire available on most combat-designed starships gives an incentive for learning some basic strategy for naval maneuvers. The existence of a third dimension extends to this by giving further options such as having your spacecraft roll to bring weapons to bear that otherwise would have no target. Finally, adding the ability to target specific points on an enemy vessel by clicking on the exact spot you want reduced to slag adds another skill for a dedicated player to develop.

As you progress further down the research trees, the ability to command larger and larger fleets will become available. Eventually command vessels become available, and instead of just providing a flat statistical bonus or something similar, the addition of a command ship to your fleet actually adds significant tangible benefits. Command ships allow for bigger fleets, but also allow for withdrawal of damaged ships from combat to be replaced with fresh reserves. Combat now becomes a balancing act of keeping your ships maneuvering, properly allocating firepower, and rotating your front and back lines in response to the flow of battle. The result is a combat system that deeply rewards players willing to spend some time developing their strategy and skill set, but still remains straightforward and simple enough for a casual player to succeed at. Regardless of skill though, in some cases its pretty hard to actually find the threats to your colony during a defensive battle. In one particularly bad example, I found my ships on the wrong side of the planet at the beginning of a battle. By the time they had gotten around it the alien fleet had reduced one of my more industrial planet's population by 75%. That battle, however, was probably as much my fault as anything else.

If I could give Sword of the Stars one final praise, it would be its atmosphere. More traditional space strategy games seem to follow the same general formula for how their universe works. First, Humans are typically portrayed as Charismatic Diplomats in older 4X games. Second, the "dangers" of the galaxy usually end up falling along the lines of "Space Dragon" or "Space Amoeba." Now I don't know about your image of humanity, but as for me the first word to come to mind when I think about our race as a whole is not 'Charismatic.' Also, I find the entire idea of a "Space Dragon" to be entirely too comical to take seriously as a threat. So little touches like the Official Unofficial human motto being "Repensum est Canicula" (Latin that translates loosely to "Payback is a Bitch") and having my colonies attacked by Von Neumman Probes (look it up!) are very refreshing.

Now comes the part where I tell you that not everything is sunshine, happiness, and free cupcakes. No game is perfect, after all. Aside from previous mentions comes a little something for the artist in all of us. The 3D artwork and models are top notch, but the rendering of characters n the game is obviously done in a very different style that is somewhat reminiscent of hand-drawn "Indie" game art. I happen to like it, but the style won’t fit every gamer’s tastes. All in all, Sword of the Stars is a solid 4X game with enough depth to satisfy a veteran of the genre but not so deep that a newbie will drown. If you're new to 4X games in general, this is probably a great place to start. Grab a copy, play some computer opponents, or get a couple friends to join in and I'm sure you'll have a blast.