Crying Suns | Demo

Channel:

Batista_Harpu

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Published on July 4, 2018 3:02:28 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P9na4uuoiU

Game:

Crying Suns (2019)

Duration: 2:49:29

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1

This is the demo for Crying Suns, a game currently live on kickstarter which you can get to by going right here.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/106952529/crying-suns

It is a fairly promising game. Easily heavily inspired by FTL as the core game play mechanics and formula for progress is essentially identical. The combat is where this game is most different. So far, it seems fairly basic, which is not a bad thing. For a tactics game though, I would wish for some degree of complexity that could be added to increase interest and the variety in available strategies and paths to attain success.

The whole game plays fairly smoothly. Though it is either a resource intensive demo, or it requires newer hardware as this game heavily lagged my machine and all of the background software that I was running, in a manner no other game has to date. (This game lagged my OBS to the point I couldn't even move the window for OBS at all, and the audio bars were frozen so I could not check to make sure everything was running fine.)

I expressed my thoughts in the video but to recap here, some things I hope are improved upon with this game include.

Something to do or other options when you are out of fuel. If fuel is supposed to be difficult to come by, then losing all fuel should have some other alternatives that occur. In this video, you will see that on both of my attempts the same thing occured. The game just became, oh now I need to survive this gauntlet of ships and never get anything else because they out pace me relentlessly. At that point you may as well reset (except for the first sector you can easily fight through the horde of ships and make it to the end.) It is fairly unforgiving though. I would almost say that currently you are encouraged to hit up a system, pray to god the sun actually provides fuel, then maybe check 1 location there but definitely not all because you gotta go move forward to the next system just to pray to god you get fuel again.

Clean up on planet exploration - Exploration of a planet if you happen to have the right hero for the job can be insanely rewarding as we see in this video. Just don't retreat and let the deaths happen because eventually the exploration ends after you press on enough, then you will reap tons of rewards. I feel like that should be toned down because the rewards for it are huge and as long as you have a single hero with 1 green bar, the success seems to be well worth the loss, let alone if you have 2 green bars for their abilities then you will reap the benefits. I would also like to see expeditions lead to either new weapons, unique one time use items, unique options, hero's, or other random things. I know this is the demo and I only played through once but so far it seems like you just swim in some major scrap gains, but outside of gaining scrap exploring did not have any other interesting points. I would love to see some unique events for exploration both positive and negative that can present new goodies, new opportunities, new chances to do things differently, etc.

Bad Events - I'm sure you can find good events but so far this game seems to be trying to be more hardcore than FTL. In my experience as you can see in the video, you only get positive effects from blue options, so always go blue obviously. If I do not go blue, I have not received a single positive outcome, everything is negative and out to get you. I think this should be tuned, as the only thing it will do for your players is make them never choose to take a risk if the result is always bad. I'm sure you can get good benefits but i just want to reiterate here to make sure that you can occasionally get positive results for taking a risk on a not blue option. Because I did not see any benefits come my way. Otherwise players just won't ever take the risk.

Combat seems a little on the basic side. The most I have to actually think about is slowly guiding my ships so they do not fly through the asteroids and take damage. Speaking of which, I hope to see more types of obstacles within the battle maps, maybe even positive tiles that controlling are beneficial.

My biggest suggestion is to really nail down the combat to make it fun. Right now it is simple. The core game play of travel to locations, get stuff and take risks, then move on because systems are being subverted for whatever reason is tried and true, and fun to boot. Your combat is where your game is truly unique though and I think the thing that will either make your game a hit or a miss.

Anyway, I enjoyed it so far but now I have high expectations. I wish the people at Alt Shift the best in their video game.
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