Shattered Suns
Cushioned between two giant nebulae there lies a fertile region of space known as the ‘Cradle of Life,’ from which all known life emerged on seven distinct worlds. Each world developed in isolation until one species on each planet developed the intelligence and technology to explore beyond its terrestrial boundaries. After thousands of years of space travel, all seven intelligent species developed a long history of trade, immigration and cultural exchange. But all this changed with the development of space gateway technology, which allowed ships to travel vast distances instantaneously. As the second Imperial War comes to a close, the known universe is carved up between two great empires. The last free sector falls to the overwhelming might of empire and a rebellion is born. Fleeing from the conquering occupation forces, one brave captain finds the means to hide and survive until the time is right to fight again. You are that captain, Captain Max, and with the help of the underground resistance, the black market and countless brave citizens longing for the return of their freedoms, you begin to build a new fleet of freedom fighters. Your hopes are that his minor rebellion will grow into a massive uprising, but that hope is far from certain. Unknown to you is that new undiscovered technologies may lay hidden that will play a part for good or ill in the uprising and that eventually, betrayal may have just as significant a part to play.
User Ratings and Reviews
1 Star SHATTERED INDEED…
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.
1 Star OMG
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.
4 Stars Give it a chance…
I guess I’m going to be going against the grain here, but I really liked this game. I think that it’s getting fairly negative reviews because a lot of people are just turned off by the graphics, and I suspect that others just don’t get the controls. It takes a bit of getting used to, but after some learning how to deal with objects that are constantly moving I find that the game has a lot to offer.
I really like the huge range of customization that the ships in the game afford the player. Rather than the standard one or two different versions of a unit that most other games in the genre have, this game really lets you customize a ship to a great degree. There are literally hundreds of different combinations you can make to a ship, and that customization is accurately represented on the ship model in the game. It’s pretty impressive how many different units you can have flying around, all with a specialized ability or task that they are equipped to handle.
the use of moving planets is a cool part of the game, and it really makes this different from most RTSes that give you a standard playing field to wander about in. Depending on if you’re a run-and-gun type of player, or a careful “turtle” who holes up to build your forces before attacking, you face a vastly different battlefield due to other planets rotating into close range. Since I’m a turtle, it kind of keeps me on my toes because I never know if I’m safe or not.
Most people out there aren’t going to go crazy over the graphics, but I’m not one of those people that really cares too much about these things. I think a lot of people like to claim that “it’s not about the graphics”, but I think that if this game had a bunch of whiz-bang effects they would have rated it higher (I’m not just talking about here on Amazon, but on the gaming sites as well). The graphics were fine to me, but my computer isn’t a tricked-out rig so I don’t really go for the graphics-heavy titles anyway.
All-in-all I really like the risks that this game took, and I think that it offered a good path away from the same-old stuff like other games in the genre. It seems that a lot of people aren’t willing to give it a chance, but if you’re into an RTS with a deep customization scheme and a lot of different offensive tactics, you should give it a try.
1 Star Very disappointed
I am very disappointed. I thought it would be more fun then it is. It can be very difficult at times to control where you are wanting to go.
1 Star A Giant Step Backwards
I was given this game as a gift, so at least I didn’t personally get ripped off. But this is awful. The game controls are clunky and non-intuitive, and the graphics are utterly primitive. Late-80s DOS space games had graphics almost as good. The options for strategic design are weak and not well-detailed, despite the product description. It’s hard to believe that such a low-quality software product is being sold in today’s market. Stay away.
Tags: Brave Captain, Captain Captain, Captain Max, Cradle Of Life, Cultural Exchange, Distinct Worlds, Empire Earth, Fertile Region, Free Sector, Freedom Fighters, Gateway Technology, Great Empires, Homeworld, Homeworld 2, Imperial War, Intelligent Species, Occupation Forces, Old Game, Space Gateway, Underground Resistance
