I recently picked up Sins of a Solar Empire, a 4XRTS. It’s a great game – well balanced, addictive, fun – the only con is the amount of time it takes to play. A small sized map takes around 4 hours to conquer, and being an addictive game, I don’t want to put it down until I’ve wiped the interstellar phase lanes with the corpses of my enemies.
From a developer perspective, they did a lot of things right with this game. The UI isn’t cluttered (and the empire tree is a fantastic addition), the graphics are great (but not top-of-the-line), the performance is great, and most importantly, it’s fun. I’ve already wasted quite a bit of time taking over star systems, but I keep telling myself that I’m learning from it. We’ll see.
