By Barry White

Welcome to Sword of the Stars, the 4X space game combining turn-based empire management and real-time tactical ship combat that I’ll bet you’ll have neither heard of nor played.

This is the Ultimate Collection, which contains the original Sword of the Stars as well as its two expansion packs, Born of Blood and A Murder of Crows. On the face of things, it certainly looks like a good deal for your cash. Develoeprs Kerberos Productions have had plenty of time and opportunity to iterate and improve on the foundations of the initial release, and while they haven’t necessarily made the most of that opportunity, the game as it stands now is vastly improved from when I played the original release in 2006. For the purposes of this review, I spent most of my time playing the A Murder of Crows expansion, mainly because it’s the latest one (but sneakily because I thought the name sounded cool). If you’re going to pick this up, I’d install and play through the game and expansions in order, as there’s an over arching narrative that will ultimately be lost on those unfamiliar with the fiction.

//RTFM
With A Muder of Crows, the game now packs in six factions, humans being only one, each with their own variation on traversing the cosmos at faster-than-light speeds. Humans use familiar faster-light-drives and their ships cruise along set lanes between worlds, while a fleet of a race such as the Morrigi will actually travel faster the more ships it contains, and the Hivers have to make do with much slower travel until they can establish their network of teleport gates. This is one of Sword of the Stars’ really good little ideas, a very easy way of giving each race a bit of a different spin and character as well as a readily apparent different style of play. Sword of the Stars’ has a handful of really good little ideas like this, ideas you wish were incorporated in to other, better, games. Things like the tech tree, which contains randomised elements that are different from one game to the next while preserving the familiar core of the tree, or the meaningful modular ship design. Managing things like your planets’ production and trade outputs is handled with a series of sliders, rather than having them governed by constructing relevant buildings planetside. There’s no fiddling with different tax rates either; you just tweak another slider. It strips out a tremendous amount of (potentially tedious) micro-management, which is perfect if the idea of a less complicated “complex” game like this appeals to you.

But there are also myriad minor problems that all combine to detract significantly from the quality of the experience. For a start, new players can expect to be left feeling slightly flummoxed by the tutorial on offer, which amounts to a series of poor-resolution videos of walkthroughs for specific aspects of the game. They’re more akin to the kinds of pre-release developer narrated play-throughs we’re seeing more and more of these days, and they’re of minimal use when trying to learn to play the game properly in addition to looking absolutely wretched. There’s supplementary text with accompanying blurry screenshots, but they might have just left a little pop up box that said “Read The Manual” to save you time. An interactive tutorial of some kind would have been a much more worthwhile and instructive addition.

The main interface for the game presents the corner of space you wish to conquer in full 3D, but there’s no way to easily scroll the map so you’re limited to rotating your view with the right mouse button and given the 3D nature of the star map it can also be difficult to judge distances between planets. The rest of the UI provides basic information about whatever planet you’ve currently selected, but if you want a summary of your empire at a glance it’s not immediately obvious where you might find such information. The research screen uses a pretty-looking 3D representation like the star map, but it makes getting things like an overview of the whole tech tree a pain, because it can’t present it all on the screen at the same time. You have to keep panning the camera around, and if you want specific info on each topic you’ll need to zoom in and double click on each one in turn. It looks slick, but feels clunky in practice; and the recorded dialogue and barks are, almost without exception, thoroughly unpleasant to have to listen to.

//Sights (not so much) on the stars
The most memorable aspect of Sword of the Stars is, ultimately, its modesty. Kerberos are a small Canadian developer made up of some of the bods responsible for Homeworld: Cataclysm and would seem to be well aware of their own limits. While Sword of the Stars doesn’t necessarily feel cheap, there’s an economy to its design and aesthetic that suggests it was made on a comparatively small budget, and the game seems to focus primarily on things the developers felt they could do extremely well, at the expense of additional features. Like I said, modest. You could otherwise term this as “a total lack of serious ambition,” if you wanted to be especially mean and uncharitable, but to do so would be strikingly unfair.

The biggest problem with Sword of the Stars is that I honestly can’t recommend you actually spend money on this package, despite the game’s merits. There are two reasons for this, and their names are Galactic Civilizations 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire. If you call yourself a fan of the 4X space strategy genre and have not to date sampled either of those titles, you shouldn’t even be glancing in Sword of the Stars’ direction. Both out-do Kerberos’ effort by a country mile. If you own either, or both, then you’ll know they provide a theoretically endless amount of play for your money, and I’ve yet to become bored or exhausted by either title in the long time that I’ve owned them.

If you find yourself in the unlikely situation of having played those games to death, and still find your thirst for intergalactic exploration and conflict has yet to be adequately slaked, then by all means consider Sword of the Stars (and the expansions to Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire while you’re at it). Its’s modest execution, though possessing some interesting aspects, just doesn’t pack enough punch to really trouble the competition. While playing it was at times a very enjoyable experience, every now and then it made me pine for some of Gal Civ’s lunatic diplomacy or Sins’ majestic bombast. While both cost more than Sword of the Stars, each delivers a deeper, more complex experience. But if that’s likely to intimidate you, or you’re looking for an easier introduction to the genre, then this might just be the package for you.

6/10

By Ben Barrett

Potential. When it comes to games, this is a horrible word. One of the worst, in fact. There can be so much of it in dire games and so little in good games. Crazy Machines Complete has masses of two kinds of potential – so as you can imagine, it has a problem.

Let’s not beat about the bush, this is a puzzle game. Of the frankly ridiculous number of levels available, each is a physics “puzzle” that must be solved by placing a number of common science classroom items (Bunsen burners, footballs, fireworks, magnets and wooden boards among others) to complete the tasks set to you by the Professor. Who is intensely annoying. The ability to turn him off is the most important setting available.
The observant among you may have noticed the inverted commas in the above paragraph. This is due to the complete lack of challenge available for anyone who knows that if you aren’t standing on something you fall over, or that fire burns. Eventually I skipped reading the instructions and simply guessed what I had to do from the equipment available. It does not help that an incredibly slow tutorial is a large part of the game – although there is a lot to explain.

//We don’t need no education
Which brings us to our first glimpse of potential. The variety of puzzles is impressive. Every level is different, the result of a varying design that frankly outranks Peggle’s in terms of doing so much with so few variables. With the more complex levels there is also a delightful feeling of accomplishment when it all comes together in the right way. They’ve taken a dull and boring concept and made it at least enjoyable for a time. However, a maggot in a tutu is still a maggot. The potential here is to have such varied and enjoyable puzzles in a more complex game. In a better game.

The other piece of potential is that this would make a brilliant educational game. Perhaps not for the more advanced classes or even anything for over twelves – but for juniors this could be a godsend. It has all the qualities needed to create a game “fer kidz”. The team behind the Crazy Machines saga should definitely think about creating a specific version for schools. The “My Lab” mode, in which players can create anything they wish from any part available in the game, would be excellent for custom scenarios and lessons.

Sadly, one of the requirements for being an intelligent educational game designed for teaching children about the wonders of physics is that, seemingly, it has to be boring. Crazy Machines Complete fills this category better than all others. It’s a real shame too – there’s a lot of potential here.

5/10