Sins is the birth of a new genre. If you like TBS games or space games - you want this game.
The first thing you just have to understand is the scale of the game. A one star game with perhaps ten planets will take you between one and two hours to play, while a ten star game with a hundred planets may well take you over twenty hours. And with the (extremely easy to use) galaxy editor you're able to build galaxies with hundreds of stars and over a thousand planets. You can zoom right in on the smallest ships and take in the amazing model detail, and you can zoom in stages all the way out to see your entire galaxy.
Now, you may be thinking how a real time strategy could work on such an epic scale. The truth is it can't. Sins isn't a real time strategy game. It's much better described as a real time representation of a turn based strategy game. In the larger games, you'll have up to perhaps three hundred ships spread out over several fleets, fighting battles all over the galaxy. Specific unit control and micromanagement just could not work on such a huge scale. You can switch all AI assistance off, set your ships into hold ground mode and manually control every ship's every move – but when you're engaging enemies in a different star system and one of your planets elsewhere is attacked by pirates, it's good to know that you can focus on the more important battle and let the AI handle everything else. And handle it will. The AI is wonderful.
While the game is always going to be compared with Homeworld, it's not Homeworld. Unit positioning won't win you the battle, micromanagement won't win you the battle (only a few ships have clicky abilities and even these are automatic by default), how many actions per minute you can perform won't win you the battle, and neither will how efficient your build queue is. What wins battles is how you build your empire, how you build your fleets, which technologies you have, and where and when you choose to engage in battle.
The most noticeable thing about Sins when you first fire up the game is how sleek and intuitive everything is. There's a wonderful menu on the title screen side which is very easily navigable, and the UI on the in-game side is astounding. You can play an entire game without seeing a single spaceship, if you like. The empire manager makes large scale ship control a breeze. Fleets, groups and the ability to set units to assist each other makes things simple. As does the search function, which lets you track down specific ships.
Ironclad's online service is also an absolute pleasure to use. It's extremely stable (even on launch day), navigating the lobbies and available games is easy, a friend list makes playing with pals simple, and setting up games with custom maps is as easy as a few clicks. Given the epic scope of the game, you really need to be able to save your online games. Thankfully, you can. So those crazy fifty hour games, you can play those online. Let me just make this clear: you can save your games online and resume them at a later date.
There isn't much of a story to speak of. There's no single player campaign at all. Everything you play will be skirmish – much like the Civilization games. A brief intro sequence gets us up to speed on the three factions in the game: a Human faction, an evil Human faction and Elda- alien faction. While their basic ship designs differ, the ships themselves are mostly the same (much like Supreme Commander) in terms of their roles, it's the technology trees that most distinctly separate the factions.
The Human faction – known as the TEC - has technologies mostly leaning towards economy improvements and production improvements, which compliments their cheap, weak ships, making them a bit of a spammer faction. You can bet that if you wipe out one TEC fleet, you'll have another coming at you pretty soon.
The Vasari – the evil Humans – is a sneaky, high-tech race. Their speciality is phase shifting (the act of moving between planets), which, combined with their expensive, more powerful ships, can make them utterly devastating.
The alien faction – the Advent – is a psionic race who specialise in improving their own vessels with support ships while causing detrimental effects to enemy ships. The Advent is also adept at shield manipulation.
When you first fire up a game, you will start with one planet. Your first goal will be to get a small economy set up, get a flagship out and a small fleet, then begin scouting and colonising nearby planets and asteroids. There are faintly opaque rings circling each celestial body. These are gravity wells. Your ships can only move freely within these which means all combat happens in specific space around planets and the like, which keeps things coherent and manageable. There are also lines connecting the planets known as phase streams. It is through these that ships travel between the celestial bodies. Ordering your ships to move into one will automatically send them zooming across to the next celestial body.
You have three economy resources to deal with. Metal, crystals and cash. Metal and crystal are gotten by mining asteroids which orbit planets (or are sometimes just floating alone if there's no planet nearby) but both can be bought on the black market. How much cash you have is determined by taxes, which is determined by how many planets you have and their respective populations and development levels. You can also earn money through your trade networks (which works in a similar way to the Civilzation games, but is more automated), or through selling your other resources on the black market.
Your flagships (capital class ships) have a WarCraft III style levelling vibe going on. They earn experience, level up and get access to new abilities. Each race has several, each of which has a specialised role (from bomber carriers to planetbusters), and they are really the centre of your fleet. You can also, if you prefer, just buy the next level for your ships, meaning those level 1 capitals you just built won't be worthless in the late game, provided you have the economy to level them up.
You'll do very little building in the game, and if you prefer you can even set the AI to handle building locations for you. Each planet you possess has a builder unit by default. These units never need to be manually commanded, and you get them free. When they die, another is rebuilt automatically. Each planet or asteroid you've colonized has so many 'slots' for logistics (trade and cultural buildings, mostly) or tactical buildings, which are mostly militarily oriented. You have to choose carefully how you plan out your planets. Building too many defences means fewer research stations. You planet may be well defended, but it won't be contributing to your advancement.
Once you have a small base and fleet established at your homeworld, you'll want to begin exploring and colonising. Exploration is easy, scouts (which can be automated) can quickly explore large chunks of the map, but colonisation is a little tougher. Most colonisable bodies are defended by non-aggressive neutrals who will defend their territory, but never leave it. This gives early colonisation a slow pace as you try and break down minor fleets. It makes rushing literally impossible, even on a small map.
You'll also have pirates to contend with. Pirates are easily comparable with the barbarians of the Civilization games, except there is a wonderful bounty mechanic in play. Pirates will attack whoever holds the highest bounty. This means you'll often find yourself either fighting off pirates, or dumping your cash into making sure your enemies have them to deal with instead.
To capture a planet, all you have to do is wipe out any existing colonisation and then send in your colonisation vessel. The rest is automatic. Once it falls under your control, you'll have a few decisions to make. Each planet can have so many upgrades in various categories ranging from civilian infrastructure (which increases cashflow) to emergency elements (which improve defences) to increasing the number of logistics and tactical slots a planet has. You can also explore your planets, for a possibility to discover artefacts that impart powerful bonuses. You're ultimately limited in how much you can develop your planet, so you'll have to decide whether you want to risk attempting to find an artefact, when it comes at the cost of the planet permanently running at a financial loss. There are many planet types ranging from terran to volcanic, but asteroids can also be colonised. You may run into some cool other things like gas giants or wormholes.
How far you can climb the technology trees is determined by how many research stations you have. There are three main tech trees – a military, a civilian and a fleet. The fleet size tree is just a linear advancement of your fleet sizes, while the military and civilian trees have a large variety of technologies unique to each faction. Many technologies are also shared by the factions, but to different degrees and some are more readily available to certain factions, which gives way to specialisation for each faction. This means that even within the technology tree, you need to strike a balance between military technologies such as shield and weaponry improvements, as well as new ship prototypes, or civilian technologies such as economic improvements and improvements to your planetary populations. Everything is a trade-off, and everything takes careful thought.
As cool and engrossing as the empire building side of the game is, this is also a space combat game – and what would a space combat game be without great combat? The battles are an absolute pleasure to watch. You'll have epic battles between huge fleets. You'll have tiny little bombers assaulting cruisers while fighters rally to defend them, larger frigates form lines and bombard enemy vessels as the larger still cruisers and the monolithic capital vessels duke it out. There are laser weapons and gauss weapons and ion cannons and ballistic rockets and it all just looks spectacular. Some of the larger ships have gun batteries all over the place and it's wonderful to watch them unleash death in all directions. Ironclad has compared the visual style of the combat with Babylon 5, and it's a good comparison. A cinematic mode option drops many of the UI icons and lines and stuff, which makes it even better. Sins is one of those games you really just want to sit back and watch.
But you should know that Sins is absolutely not an RTS. As I said above, it's more like a real time representation of a turn based game. If everything up above seems so academic and boring, it's because it is. This isn't an action game with big explosions and high-action. The battles do look magnificent, but in a two hour game you might spend less than twenty minutes actually fighting.
Visually, the game is pretty spectacular. It scales down very well so even machines three years old can run it pretty nicely, but if you have modern hardware you can expect some astounding visuals. The ship models are extremely detailed and the effects are great. The game is also extremely serene. The nebulae are jawdropping, the space backdrops are wonderful and a great orchestral score backs everything perfectly. The sound effects are all very appropriate and add greatly to the feel of the game. The game is also extremely well optimised. It runs extremely well (and the level of zoom at both ends of the spectrum makes it seem even more spectacular) and it plays well in a window, which is great because it's the kind of game you sit down to play Tuesday afternoon and your next glance at the clock shows that it's still afternoon. But now it's Friday.
The AI is mostly impressive, which is not entirely surprising as the game is as much about empire management as it is anything else. It will launch sneak attacks on your planets while your main forces are engaged elsewhere. Even on medium, it can be a pretty tough challenge. In games like this, though, it's always going to be other players that offer the starkest challenge. And Ironclad has really built the game with that in mind. As said above the game is a pleasure to play online.
But no review would be complete without at least some complaints. So this review is going to be incomplete. Sins is the birth of a genre – it's the first example of a Real Time 4X game, and it does it better than I could have ever imagined. This game breaks through all imaginable boundaries – it plays extremely well, it runs extremely well, it looks extremely well. If you like the Turn Based Strategy genre, or space games in general, you want this game.
Videos:
Scale: http://youtube.com/watch?v=jEGxNC11yPU
Combat : http://youtube.com/watch?v=wtBLFBXRT1A