Crying Suns

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.

It is truly a masterpiece. I like everything about this game:s
● Setting about technological singularity inspired by Azimov/Herbert Jr. books
● A truly intriguing script, masterful character development and narrative design
● Cool combat mechanics: Real-Time with Pause + classic Rock-Paper-Scissors Balance
● Wonderful design of characters, ships and huds in pixel art style
● A decent replay value: big variaty of ships to try
● Perfect for feeding your ADHD while watching a movie
Also if you are looking for the closest relative of "FTL" this would be correct choice.
Final grade: 10/10

FTL with macro management. Mini Total War in space. But with ships.
I wish there was a bit more depth when it comes to pilots and spaceships, however. With couple of updates or additions it could have been turned into a masterpiece. Yet banger of a game.
I didn't know how much I needed it.

I’m playing this game for the second time, both times on hard difficulty — and it’s still just as engaging.

The story is incredible. It’s one of those rare games where I actually read every line of dialogue instead of skipping — the writing really pulls you in. The combat system is also very satisfying and well-designed.

What I especially like is how accessible the game is. It’s lightweight, runs smoothly, and doesn’t require a high-end setup. The gameplay is easy to get into, which makes it perfect to play anytime, on almost any device — without sacrificing depth or quality.

Honestly, this is one of the best games I’ve played in this category.

It would be amazing to see it released on iOS and Android — it feels like a perfect fit for mobile and could reach a much bigger audience.

A beautiful game, well made, beautiful visually and in storytelling. The gameplay feels good and unique.
I strongly recommend it.

I'm pretty sure I got this gamer for free during an event. However, even at full price I would have nothing significant to complain about. An engaging story wrapped up neatly in an excellent little roguelike package with neat artistic flair. I truly wish my steam gameplay hours were more accurate to my actual playtime so I could gauge the amount of time it took to complete and come up with a good entertainment value assessment so I could list a price point where this goes from a good deal to a must have in my book. Alas, I've often been so enthusiastic about the storyline and gameplay that I've been forced to leave the program running after leaving my desk at the last possible second. It is a great game. you will not be disappointed.

PS. I notoriously break games. Particularly early on in my playthroughs which can tend to ruin my enjoyment of the latter portions of the game. Crying Suns stood up to that tendency and still offers a reasonable degree of challenge after I have seen ALL of the mechanics. Yes some things can be cheesed, between AI tendency and especially potent abilities hoarded and used excessively, but nothing really glaring can be broken to the point of removing all challenge from the game and the randomness of it all keeps excessive reliance on a particular troop ability from being a reliable way to progress through the story.

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.