Crying Suns

its a good game but the gameplay loop gets repetitive really fast
i got multiple endings because i was invested in the story, it was not worth it, not because its bad, but because theres so little of it

This game gets a lot of things right for me, but it also has some weird mechanics that I disliked, alongside systems that I really enjoyed.
What I like:
- The story is well written and engaging, and it was ultimately the main reason I kept coming back to the game. For the final chapter, I turned down the difficulty to “easy” because I wanted to see how the story ends without having to redo multiple runs.
- The visual and audio design is excellent.
- I like the pause and fast-forward mechanics during combat. Being able to halt the game and think about your next move feels very satisfying.
What I think is a hit or miss:
- What I like about roguelikes is the moment when you get your hands on modifiers or artifacts that let you become insanely overpowered. This game has some interesting “auxiliary systems,” but they are very expensive. You also never know when you will be able to buy them, as not every store offers them. This forces you to hoard large amounts of scrap “just in case,” which I really dislike. I want to use my scrap actively to improve my chances of survival.
- The best way to get scrap is by sending your soldiers and one officer on “missions” to extract scrap and artifacts. These can include weapons, fighters, and other rewards. While there are many ships with minor combat advantages, some of them are clearly handicapped when it comes to running missions. At a certain point, you cannot scale as well as you could by focusing on missions. I consider this a major design flaw, because I actually enjoy the missions and their puzzle elements. Why should I choose a ship that limits my primary resource income?
What is definitely a miss:
- The combat design has several issues. When you hover your mouse over ships that are positioned in asteroid fields, you often only get the asteroid tooltip instead of the ship’s information.
- When you move a ship to the upper-right corner of the screen, its information UI gets in the way.
- When you order a magnet frigate to attack one of the Prag Mah pylons and an enemy unit enters an adjacent tile, the frigate cannot turn to attack the enemy. Instead, it keeps attacking the pylon, while the enemy ship cannot retreat due to the magnet mechanic. This situation is simply frustrating.
- The ship pathfinding tends to prefer moving along the y-axis before the x-axis. For some reason, this is not always the optimal route. At least the pause function allows you to correct it manually.
- On “normal” difficulty, you never feel like you are a step ahead of your opponent. On the contrary, you constantly feel like you are reacting to events instead of actively shaping the battle. I understand that, lore-wise, you are a single ship fighting through different sectors, but the lack of room for planning is disappointing.
- The “wrecked ship” mechanic feels unfair to the player. In each encounter, the enemy battleship has the same resources as the player and uses them aggressively. As a result, your ships often end up wrecked, and there is nothing you can do about it except hope to reach a shipyard and spend 120 scrap on repairs. That scrap could otherwise be used for important upgrades or saved for an auxiliary system that might improve your chances of survival. Yes, there are special modified units that do not suffer from the scrapped penalty, but that does not fully solve the issue.
- My strongest ship was almost always the scrapper ship, the very first one you unlock. Throw everything you have at the enemy and stall until you win — it works far too reliably.
- Weapons often felt underwhelming. There were some strong ones for stalling or removing pieces of the board, but effects like “units lose 2.5% of their health for 10 seconds” were not enjoyable. You are forced to immediately retreat your ships for repairs to avoid the wrecked status, which means these effects have little real impact on the battlefield.
- 50/50 events are simply not fun.
Overall, I really liked this game and spent a fair amount of time with it. I would recommend it, as it is genuinely fun and challenging. You can always lower the difficulty to “easy,” which reduces the enemy battleship’s health, the number of fighters, and the prices in stores and events. I think the game could have been even better if it allowed the player to feel at least somewhat powerful and if the scrapped mechanic or the mission-based income system were reworked.

Even after over a dozen times playing it through, this is still by far my favourite game out of all I've played. The story is amazing, the gameplay is simple yet fun and the pace of the game itself is perfect. It's hard to say too much more about the game without spoiling it, but if your looking for a mix of on board unit control with tough moral choices and deep lore and story then this is the perfect game for you

One of the best scifi games I've ever played. The story is magnificent and really hooks you. The gameplay is also great and i recommend this to anyone even at full price. This game should win awards for what it was able to achieve. Thank you for making this!

A great game with outstanding gameplay and story.
Very good length for an indie title, solid replayability and variation between classes. All in all, an almost perfect rogue-lite in terms of gameplay. Though personally, I feel the RNG takes away from the experience. To each their own I suppose.
The buffs offered by Crew-members suffer from the fact a good 2/3 are either useless in actual action or far too niche to be usable in most builds/runs, depending instead on RNG for their usefulness.
The narrative is great and the many encounters it offers are truly interesting, for the first three or so times you see them. There are some issues once you learn the outcomes and the impact you might have from seeing the consequences of your actions truly dims when it's the fifth time seeing the exact same result.
The Boss fights are great and each chapter succeeds in making its faction stand out from the rest. Though there are strategies that simply work against anything the regular gameplay would throw your way.*
The biggest problem with the game is the ending. It's just disappointing. The final Boss fight is far too easy, especially compared to what came before it and the concluding cut-scenes are disappointing.
Another issue is I simply did not come to care for the protagonist' emotional journey to find his wife.
This game is a true example of the true reward was the journey, not the destination. Still, I recommend it. It provided a very fun experience. 8.5/10

Awesome game with a super intriguing story. Game play gives Ender's Game vibes as you direct your ships across the battle grid in real time to take down the enemy flagship. The only criticism I have is that after ~20 hours you start to notice a lot of repeat events. If they had tripled the amount of random events in the game I'd have no issue saying this game was as good as FTL. As it stands its still one of the best space roguelites out there and deserves more recognition.

I got over a thousand hours of gameplay out of this, so it's fair to say I think it's more than worth it for the price.