I recently put few hours into Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Beta. If you have played the original, you already know how this new standalone expansion plays out. It still has all the good, but it still has all the bad too. For me SoaSE was one of those games that I wanted to love, but it just didn’t deliver. They have added detail to models and textures, but the combat is still very unengaging.
That’s an issue for me. You have to zoom in ridiculously close to see some projectiles flying, and even then you won’t be hearing much combat sounds. Also the projectiles seem to be mostly for show (which is ironic, since there isn’t much show to speak of), and don’t represent the background math much at all. I don’t like the pacing of the combat either, hence the comic. It’s probably painfully slow because there’s much to do in the game, and if the combat happened very fast you wouldn’t have time to react. But that and the lack of movement and effects just make it too uninteresting for me.
The game play actually reminds me of MOBA games. It revolves around the capital ships, which you level up by killing rats or creeps or whatever you want to call them. Then you just try to hunt down enemy capital ships before they jump out of combat. That’s my experience anyway, but whatever you thought of the earlier games, that will be your thought of this one. I don’t regret my purchase, even got a discount because I own the earlier ones, and I expect to put much more hours into it at later beta stages and release. I just wish it was less boring to look at and had more game play variation.
Speaking of MOBA and space, Stellar Impact is now available in many places. I tried the beta at some point and became rather intrigued. I haven’t played MOBA games much, but this one seemed like something I might spend more time with. The price tag certainly isn’t high.