Game Review: Sword of the Stars Collector's Edition

While space strategy games may be about exploring the far reaches of the galaxy and beating off attacking alien hordes, Sword of the Stars balances out things nicely with a great research and exploration scheme that is easy to manage.

Ratings: Graphics & Audio: 18/25, Gameplay: 20/25, Creativity 17/25, Fun 21/25
Total: 76/100

Sword of the Stars Collectors Edition contains the Sword of the Stars game and the expansion Born in Blood as well as a few bonus items that are not all that much. The core game here and the expansion are a great way to while away hours as you explore the galaxy, create an empire and beat off those attacking hordes.

Sword of the Stars has less of a campaign but an easy and simple quick start to play in several types of tactical and strategic space colonization games that offers plenty of depth. The game has a simple and quick way to build your empire with no micro management and little worries about the day to day resource gathering.

You manage fleets, research and building as well as colonizing new planets while the actual building on the planets and resource gathering is all taken over by those little people down below. You're the one in charge so they have left all the little decisions to someone else so you can concentrate on the bigger picture.

Sword of the Stars does a great job with the strategy and gives plenty of in depth gameplay with a good research tree system for building new technologies, designing your own ships and managing your fleets. There is a good system for maintenance, repair and refueling so you can really concentrate on the main aspects of the strategy.

You have the main area of research with groups like ballistic weapons, power systems and computer systems so there are really good and simple sounding areas to develop your research in. The development only takes a few seconds to figure out how the system works and all the controls and getting things under way are simple.

Actually most of the controls and how to play the game is easy and jumping into the tutorials is nice but not all that necessary for general gameplay. It does give you a nice basis for how to play and the controls but like many strategy games this one is not so complicated that it has a steep learning curve.

There are some terms and parts of the game that will take some getting used to and figuring out but for the most part you can just jump in and learn on the fly after you go through the quick tutorial and have fun playing. Sword of the Stars offers a good mix of complication and simple gameplay with easy to use controls to make it fun yet difficult enough to take some time to master the finer points.

Keeping the micromanaging to a minimum you have some very large decisions to make on how your empire will be run like do you want to be friendly and peacefully explore, only attacking when provoked or run around shooting anything that moves. Sword of the Stars gives you several scenarios to play instead of a lengthy campaign which I feel is better in a strategy game that will take hours to play through one game by itself.

Given the length of time to play one game with turns lasting several minutes for you to decide what research to develop, ships to design as well as build and planets to manage you have a good lengthy game in any of the scenarios they have to offer. You can also create your own scenarios in a custom game you design by picking the type and size of solar system, species and other specifics to play the scenario you have created.

During normal gameplay you have a map of your empire open and can zoom in on planets to check out statistics, see the various craft orbiting and move to the research, management and other pages. If you encounter another ship at a planet or in transit from one destination to another a battle screen will open and you can decide how to proceed. You can choose whether you want to manage the battle yourself or let the computer auto complete the battle using a simple formula or even retreat from the fight.

The combat portion of Sword of the Stars is simple but fun with you controlling your ships and the weapons on them and strategically moving and firing. There are quick buttons for things like stand off attack, close in and break off or retreat for both individual craft and your fleet. You also have the choice to let the Ai target parts of the ship at will or you can pick spots on the ship like drive or weapons to hit them where you want.

With all these choices there are plenty of strategic battles to fight and a wealth of gameplay but some may not be content to fight against a limited AI so they have included a multiplayer quick match and custom gaming setup system. You can play against others in a quick match setup that has the planets, solar system and all the particulars of your gaming picked out or you can design your own and ask others to play on the Lighthouse Interactive servers.

I found a few people to play online a few times so you should be able to find someone to play against and you can always join the forums at Lighthouse or SwordoftheStars.com. The multiplayer is also fun and gives that added challenge of a live person who does not go by the book.

Sword of the Stars is a really good game with some good graphics and audio as well as the great gameplay. Kerberos did a nice job of balancing the whole game; controls, amount of technology and research so you can play and not be overwhelmed with too much to do and handle. The games general style and gameplay are fun and gives you enough of a strategic overview to be able to control the outcome with a better or different approach to the research and technology as well as just outnumbering your opponent.

I enjoyed Sword of the Stars and found it to be an easy game to jump into and not have to spend very much time at all getting to really playing well and understanding the games finer points. Sword of the Stars Collector's edition contains the additional race of the Zuul and a few scenarios involving them as well as the original Sword of the Stars game.

For a pretty easy and quick to start sci fi strategic turn based game Sword of the Stars is a great choice and one that is more about the overall picture and less about micromanagement.