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Shattered Suns, Shattered Game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: August 18, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This game has been way overhyped. This game claims to be a great RTS, but it is really a horrible cross between a windows 95 game[with the graphics to match] and a text message RPG. The camera is impossible to control, they have no tech support on their home page, and the game has severe technical glitches. It crashed 10 minutes in. Unbelieveable! This game is nothing short of a rip-off. I AVOID AT ALL COSTS!

OMG

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: August 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I played Homeworld a long time ago. After that there was Homeworld: Cataclysm and Homeworld 2. All three of them were great games and provided tons of three dimensional fleet battles. Other games came after that as well. They were clones and IMO were not as great, but each of them tried to improve upon the concept of three dimensional space conflict. One game that I remember specifically was O.R.B. (Offworld Resource Base) It was a little bit of a step up but I remember that it got a lot of flack because it did not do enough to surpass it's Homeworld counterpart at that time. It was still kinda fun but it was a 'too little too late kind of thing'.

Shattered Suns... is a game that does not improve upon any concept in use today. In fact, it goes so far as to backdate graphics, camera control, playability and compatibility about TEN YEARS. Thats right. This game sucks so incredibly bad that the first ten minutes I was honestly wondering what the back story for the games development was. Who would honestly sit down and say to themselves 'Okay, the game does not have ANY of the advantages or playability features that EVERY SINGLE 3D space RTS game IN HISTORY has had. Lets just ship it for twenty dollars less and a little note that says we'll fix your game later when we have the time."

I tried so hard to find the good points of this game. I really did. There was a hope that the 'Ship Customization' portion of this game would go one step further then all of it's predecessors by allowing players to make their own ships. If that was true, it would be the only part of this game which equaled or surpassed every similar game in the past ten years.

Unfortunately the ship customization feature consisted of (Shields + or -) and (Armor + or -) You see... you customize the ship by spending resources on this ship. Customizing is as easy as clicking on the plus icon or the minus icon. But even that is a pain as they make you click on armor first and then on the plus button. Additionally, if the unit does not have the correct research to accomplish this, it doesn't even tell you. It just highlights in red and sits there. Nothing about this game is intuitive. Docking a ship with a moon requires that you select the ship, click the follow button, click on the moon and then unclick the follow button so that the ship actually docks with the moon when it gets close enough instead of just following the moon around.

That is a direct quote from the tutorial!!!!

Seriously guys. In the words of PCGamer, Avoid Like The Plague.

Great 3D combat if you take time to ramp up

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: August 19, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This is a very different game, but if you can spend a little time in the beginning getting used to flying ships in three dimensions, and if you love sci fi and space ships like me, this game is well worth the time it takes to ramp up. Just don't expect to be up to speed in five minutes. You'll need to get the hang of the controls first and play the first few scenarios in the campaign, but once you get the controls down the three dimensional battles can get pretty awesome.

Most space games I've played have their ships move in two dimensions. In this game, everything moves in three dimensions. It took me a little while to get the hang of controlling the ships in three dimensions, but once you get it it's actually pretty easy. A word to the wise, just right click on the things you want to follow or attack and don't worry about flying ships to points in space by yourself. I got caught up learning to fly them myself, but that can get tricky and you really don't need to do that since you can just give them commands to follow other things.

The whole three dimensional thing affects how you control the camera too. Basically, the camera is just like any camera in any realtime strategy game. Moving the mouse to the edges of the screen moves the camera left, right, forward and backward. The mouse wheel lets you move the camera up and down. The only difference in this game is that this game also lets you focus the camera. You double click on anything (planet, moon, ship, whatever) to focus the camera on it and keep it in the center of the screen at all times. That way instead of moving the camera left or right you can pivot the camera around a planet or ship you're attacking. Sometimes if it gets disorienting (especially in deep space dogfights) I just go back to the usual controls and stop focusing the camera.

The graphics leave something to be desired. They're not horrible, but they're not great either. The ship engine trails are just yellow streaks. The autoemitter weapons have a sort of lightning effect that could be really cool if done better, but it falls flat. The company's customer support site says they'll be releasing "free upgrades" so hopefully they might fix some of the graphics in one of those.

Another thing is that it takes a while for the campaign to get going. You don't get into combat with your own fleet of ships until you're a few missions into the campaign, but once you do it gets a lot more fun and the fighting gets a lot more intense.

Overall I give this game a 4/5 because I've never played a game with this kind of intense three dimensional fighting before. And yes, I've played Homeworld. If you love space and you don't mind spending some time to learn to fight in three dimensions, this game is definitely a keeper.

SHATTERED INDEED...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 27, 2008
Author: Amazon User

This summer PC Gaming was one disappointment after another. Unfortunately SHATTERED SUNS is no exception.

The graphics of this game are so dated and simplistic that I had to go back to the original Empire Earth to find something to compare them with! Homeworld 2 and even Homeworld: Cataclysm (a decade old game mind you!) had much better surfaces, shadows and afterburners. Not to mention gameplay...

SHATTERED SUNS interface feels clumsy and counterintuitive. One needs to micromanage everything as the AI (if existent) has flatlined. The camera will leave you seasick. And the advertised "ship customization" is nowhere near the Galactic Civilizations 2 standards: you can simply add defense or attack points to your predesigned ships, that's it! Lucky us they did not decide to name them "hit points" and "THACO" and hype it as a space cRPG...

On a final note, the relative speeds of planets and ships is a joke - but this game has much bigger problems than...relativistic inconsistencies. No amount of patching can fix this one.

My advice: go with Sins of a Solar Empire instead, or, even better, replay the Homeworld series.

What is this?????

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: August 22, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Well I have to say right out of the box it did not work. I had to get vista servive pack 1 from Microsoft. Then it worked. Well dont really care now the game is just not for me. the user interface a little messed up.
graphics are not that good. If you want a good game look at sins of a solar empire that has a great user interface and is very well layed out and has a little learing cure but it still great and it also gone gold

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