Napoleon finds the willpower to break away from Sins of a Solar Empire, the latest RTS from Stardock for the PC, and gives us an honest assessment of this very popular game here at 360Arcadians. Is the game worth the hype train it has gotten on our forums? Read on and see for yourself.

Last week Sins of a Solar Empire hit stores to many a gamer’s delight and much hullabaloo. So what is Sins of a Solar Empire? It is a space-empire RT4X game on an epic scale. To put it another way, if Galactic Civilizations and Homeworld had sex while watching Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Sins of a Solar Empire would be their gigantic bastard child.

To try to put it succinctly, you’re taking control of one of three races(consisting of your standard boring humans, less boring psychic outcast humans, and a race of aliens on the run from… something) and trying to colonize planets and asteroids, gather and manage resources, setting up trade routes, buying and selling resources on the black market, researching new technologies(hello, huge tech tree!), building up defenses, assembling enormous fleets, and attempting to juggle alliances. All of these tasks will have to be taken care of to be successful, which means micromanaging like a fiend, but once you get the hang of the flow of the game, managing your empire feels for satisfying than tedious. And as your empire slowly expands like my grandmother after she’s eaten onions, you can quickly see and access your various colonies and ships with the extremely handy Empire Tree, which puts icons of everything you own in the game on the left side of the screen, giving you handy shortcuts to it all.

So what’s the campaign like? Well there isn’t one. Oh, you wanted story? Sorry. Read the manual if you must have some story. Sins of a Solar Empire eschews a campaign mode for one player scenarios. You may not be getting an intricate plot or hours of cut scenes, but you are still getting an epic experience. Really though, unless you are a friendless goiter you should be playing multiplayer. Multiplayer allows you and up to nine of your buddies fight each other or the computer

And believe it when you read the word epic used to describe this game. The scale is mind blowing. Marlon Brando huge. Orson Welles huge. The maps consist of solar systems, which can contain many planets and asteroids, and maps can contain many solar systems. The scale is simply astounding as you zoom out from a lowly frigate all the way out to see dozens of worlds connected. This combined with a 10 player limit can make for long ass games that can take hours upon hours to complete.

And this in my opinion is Sins of a Solar Empire’s biggest flaw. The game goes about as fast as a turtle that’s just had a stroke. As a natural effect of the OMG scale, it takes ships forever to get anywhere. To be fair, it wouldn’t be realistic for your fleets to be able to zip about the galaxy, but it can be agonizing when you are playing and you are watching a fleet make several jumps to their destination, especially if this destination is where and ally needs your assistance. I guess you could perhaps think of this as a positive, since it certainly adds to the tension. You can increase the speed of the game, but the game doesn’t feel much faster to me on the highest setting. A saving grace for the potential length of the games is that Sins allows you to save your multiplayer games so you can some sleep.