Exploding has never been so beautiful
The game starts out with an intro from the human perspective, explaining that some strange race from 10,000 years ago has returned, and that another race of religious deviants that was banished a millennia ago has returned at the same time. So the humans are fighting a war on two fronts. Apart from that, the rest of the story is up to the player. That's why there's no campaign mode.
Kudos to the developers for creating an engine that not only looks great on high end machines, but is able to run smoothly on 3 year old machines running an ATI X300 card. They also claim that the engine will be able to scale upwards as graphics standards improve. Older machines may experience a longer load time, but that's to be expected. Once its loaded, the game runs smooth and flawlessly.
Sins is first and foremost a war game. Although diplomacy, resource, and tech research are included, waging holocaustic war is the primary way to win the game. In fact, its the only to win the game.
In single player, the diplomacy AI is feeble, as any faction you make alliances with will break them within an hour, and then may immediately either attack you, or even more ridiculous, may ask for the exact same treaty as they just broke.
In a similar fashion to other strategy games, you collect resources and spend them on the units you have available to you depending on your race and how deep you've researched. The units themselves, while very cool, are somewhat limited in scope and have no customize-ability (apart from modding, I'm sure). And the designs of the ships and structures are heavily influenced from other space games, notably Homeworld for ships,
and the X series for structures. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but some more unique designs would have been nice to see. Capital ships are your huge battleships which can turn
the tide of battle, and they can also gain special abilities as they level up. But they max out at level 10 and each capital ship type only has four abilities available to choose from.
Also, the tech tree is severely limited in scope, and not exactly unique to each race. It takes about four hours to research the entire tech tree at normal pace, and most games will take much longer than that, so it only really effects really short skirmish games. For someone who was hoping for a tech tree similar to that of Space Empires, which is absolutely massive and really makes you think, this is a disappointment. Each race technically has a unique tree, but in similar fashion to the Total War games, the differences are minute and don't truly play a factor into the game. Resources are unlimited unless you change the options.
Combat is pretty straight-forward. You build a fleet, then decide where you're going to attack, and you blow up your enemy. Although different units have different strengths, what's lacking is a real rock-paper-scissors effect, with a large number of heavy combat ships being able to wipe out a fleet with a varied assortment of ships.
The AI will vary its tactics which is nice and less predictable, sometimes hitting you with small guerrilla squads, and other times sending what must be its whole fleet to a single planet.
One excellent point in Sins is that your military supply will max out, meaning you are unable to just build and build. This makes a coherent strategy necessary, as in larger systems you will simply be unable to defend every planet all the time. This also makes some planets change ownership with several factions throughout a game. Travel is done via phase lanes, and not every planet is accessible from all the others, allowing for military bottlenecks.
Directing the combat is also straight-forward, you highlight your ships and tell them where to attack. Or, you can let the AI direct them. Control freaks may get upset as sometimes you have to let your ships control themselves while you focus on another battle on the other side of the
system. Or, you can click on the cinematic mode and just watch the battle in all its glory from whatever camera angle you prefer. Explosions are quite beautiful, particularly an enemies capital ship.
One thing that is missing is an option to view the battle from the perspective of a ship. Though you can pin a ship and follow it, it takes a while to get the camera angle right.
The map editor is nice and will give the game tons of replay-ability, so long as you don't tire of space combat. You can add as many stars, planets, asteroids, and anomalies as you choose. What you cannot do is create fleets and place them in the map. That would be a nice touch for someone looking to create a story-like campaign.
Sins of Solar Empire is a great game and worth the $40 to anyone who loves space games, but its lacking in enough areas to be denied a 10 status.
More ship classes, customizing ship options, a much deeper tech tree, and more complex combat strategy would be a welcome edition to any expansion or sequel.