Sins of a Solar Empire II - Long Form First Impressions/Early Access "Review" | When a unique entry into the RTS/4X space game genre gets a Mass Effect 2 level upgrade.

Sins of a Solar Empire II is a Masterpiece.

...hi.

I've never done one of these before but in my drive and desire to help build the fediverse/help it flourish I had the idea of typing this up and decided to go ahead and do it.

So - before we really get started I might as well get this part out of the way: checking my Epic account (I loathe epic btw, I would have never installed it had it not been specifically for Sins 2) I've spent all of 3 hours and 34 minutes on Sins 2.

...that's nowhere near enough time to form a full opinion and/or have the audacity to call it a Masterpiece. Especially when you take into account that the game itself isn't even fully "out" yet - it's still being built. It's not balanced [as per the Devs themselves] - all the factions haven't been added, all the systems haven't been vetted and tested and re-vetted and re-tested to make sure that they're doing everything that they're supposed to be doing and everyone is having a good time.

It's not finished. It's not done. It's not even fully /out/ yet so how can I possibly justify calling it a Masterpiece. That is a perfectly valid question and thought and one I myself struggled with while thinking of the first line of this review and yet... my brain refused to use any other opening statement because...

...well because it's true. And unless the Devs somehow manage to fumble the ball on what they've already started building (which is possible but I'd argue highly unlikely given what they've already shown) it will remain true up to and until it comes out.

So let's take a step back. Who am I? Nobody - a random gamer much like many of you. Just another voice in a sea of voices expressing their opinion on the internet in hopes that it helps and/or brings attention to something they feel passionate about.

What are my gaming credentials for a game like Sins; what justification do I have for my first analysis and/or impression: Checking Epic I have 3 hours and 34 minutes in Sins of a Solar Empire 2. Checking /Steam/ I have 245 hours in Distant Worlds 2, 587 hours in Stellaris, and 548.5 hours in Sins of a Solar Empire 1. And a spattering of 40ish hours each across a few others like AoW Planetfall and 40k Gladius.

While I know there are others out there with much more impressive gaming resumes in this gaming space I'm at least relatively comfortable with my own experience in this particular space to feel somewhat justified in my opinion enough to share it.

So - that out of the way - and assuming you put any credence behind my first impressions - the next question then would be /why/ do I have them? Why that thought with all but no time in the game itself. As mentioned above I'm quite familiar with games in this space, the scale of them, and just how long a single map can last. 3 hours is literally nothing.

...and yet...

Sins of a Solar Empire II has /it/. It has the "thing." The "secret ingredient." The "X-Factor."

My 3 hours with Sins II resulted in such an immense feel of "time-suck" that I was perfectly prepared to come here with all of /1/ hour under my belt only to be surprised that what I thought was 1 hour turned out to be 3. And the almost nightmarish pull of the game haunts me even now, beckoning me to walk down it's road towards hundreds and hundreds of hours already. And the Vasari (my faction of choice) isn't even playable yet.

But /why/? Why do I rate it so highly with barely any playtime and missing so much content - and the problem there is that it's really hard to answer that specifically without you actually having your hands on it. I can say this though: Have you played Sins 1?

If so, if you've lost tens to hundreds of hours into Sins like I have, it's simple. Go to YouTube and look up "sins 2 titan gameplay." Check out Avatar WarMech's channel (not mine nor related to me in any way, it's just the one I stumbled upon while doing a random YouTube search ~2 weeks ago.) I just watched one of them and that was enough. I then posted it in my discord channel and the two other former Sins turned Stellaris players watched it with me. We all watched it together and basically started drooling. I legitimately had a visceral reaction when it ended - typing "No! It stopped!!" right after it before remembering that it was a video and not me playing. After that one of them bought it like two days ago and has been gushing about it so much that I had to buy it myself. So I did. Now /I'm/ gushing about it.

If you've played Sins 1 before that should be all it takes. And to answer the question: yes - not only is it "that good" it's even better when you actually get your hands on it.

But what if you /haven't/ played - and lost hours of your life to - Sins I? Well then it gets harder to explain. But I'll at least make the attempt.

So what is Sins of a Solar Empire 2 - and it's predecessor... Sins (and Sins 2) would be the game that my mind would immediately assign the tile of "Grand Strategy" if Paradox hadn't already overtaken the delineator within their own gaming stable. It's a hybrid between RTS and 4x that manages to blend the two together in a unique way that - at least that I've found - no other game has ever managed to pull off. And I've spent years desperately searching for one due to Sins 1 infamously having a memory limitation due to it's 32 bit architecture not scaling well into large, heavily modded maps. I /still/ have slight PTSD due to a very specific incident where I'd been waging war in a single gravity well with my titan, core-ward for /hours/, had re-routed my secondary fleets to that gravity well to try to push the point and, right as they were warping in, the game utterly and completely froze. And upon restarting it that save never worked again.

...twitch

The game that has come closest to scratching that itch, both for myself and the two other former Sins turned Stellaris players, is, unsurprisingly, Stellaris. Similar real time vibe. Similarity in regards to starting with one planet and attempting to maintain control of and/or take over the rest of the galaxy. Research trees. Ship classes. ...similar. But different.

Stellaris was never Sins - it was just close enough to Sins (and, to be fair, has enough of it's own thing as well) to scratch enough of the itch to be "good enough;" at least for those of us who needed a Sins replacement. And, as I said, it, in and of itself, is good enough on its own to have its own following.

Sins - or at least Sins 1 - for all it was a hybrid between RTS and 4x, leaned far more towards the "exterminate" side of the equation. Sins is a war game. What diplomacy existed was typically geared towards war and warring better (in Sins 1 you could ally with someone else on the board and share technology between yourselves which assists in....war). Sins is about War. You're going to be fighting someone - possibly multiple someones simultaneously - while building up defenses and increasing your ability/your fleet's ability to wage war. And defend yourself from those seeking to wage war upon you.

Sins, at its core, regardless of the research and "diplomacy" options, is a war game.

And what a glorious one it is. Driven in no small part by its scale. In multiple aspects.

I don't want to quantify how long an average large Stellaris map campaign can take. Technically, depending on how you set it, it can probably run indefinitely. But in /reality/ how many of us get new ideas or new strategies and restart just a few hours in to try out something new. Or make a new race. Or tweak the race we already designed...

A large Sins of a Solar Empire map campaign can /probably/ take less time to complete than a large Stellaris map can but, if I'm really honest about it, my mind flips back and forth towards which one really does take the longest. I'm leaning towards Stellaris but Sins - at the very least at least in feel - is close enough that it's not an immediate "win" in this category.

And that's really part of its draw.

This is not a quick "hop on for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, a couple hours" and be done type game (barring if you set your game to smaller settings to get that sort of experience.) This is, or at least /can/ be, a multi-hour - multi /tens/ of hours - epic war of survival/battle of attrition between galactic powers. And it /feels/ that way. In the most epic and, specifically, /immersive/ way. In a far more personal way than Stellaris ever did.

Something about Sins' scale and presentation always drew me in far more than Stellaris' ever did. The starting handful of ships you get in Stellaris that you build out into a fleet is just that, just a random fleet. You'll probably have multiple ones of them and you'll casually toss them at this or that event and/or enemy and never really think twice about it. Maybe you'll tweak it to your specifications or against whatever specific fleet setup you're attacking or defending against but it's...just a handful/collection of ships. In and of themselves they don't really mean much.

In Sins it's entirely different. Your Capital ships level up. So that first Cap ship you get at the beginning of the game is the flagship of your entire fledgling empire. Valiantly going in all but alone (supported by a mere scattering of smaller screening craft) to take over the first few crucial planets and help establish the very foothold of your entire empire to come. Are those first few combats hard? Most of the time no, unless you blind jump into a gravity well you really shouldn't have, but you'll still find yourself paying far more attention to those first few ships than you do in Stellaris. And even as your fleet grows and cap ships and Titan come online there's a level of attachment to your fleet(s) in Sins that I've never felt in Stellaris.

There's a vibe, a time-scale, a scaling system in the game that really does..."work," for lack of a better way to put it, at pulling you into the moment and the events. Combat in a single gravity well around a single planet between mid to late game fleets can last for literal hours as you send in backup fleets and the AI sends in backup fleets and you try to take down defenses. And it happens in such a way that you can let the combat be ongoing and shift focus to a planet/gravity well on the entire other side of your empire to work on building /it/ up defensively or build up your industry/money-making capability for a few minutes before re-focusing back on the on-going all-out-war waging on the frontlines.

There's a feeling when sending a ship from your homeworld buried deep in the back lines of a late game map and watching as it calmly warps from system to system and almost unconsciously remembering each fight and battle to take each of those planets. Seeing the defenses that you've built up glittering in the aether. The very planets, defenses, and state of the galaxy itself all telling a tale unique to you and your empire and /that specific map/ each time.

Whether it's ship scale or galaxy scale or just overall vibe and pacing of the game itself Sins of a Solar Empire has always felt far more intimate than Stellaris' more impersonal presentation, even though you can very specifically tweak the exact specifications of your Civilization in Stellaris vs the "general template" (3 factions, each broken into sub-factions, loyalist or rebel) of Sins.

Which brings us to Sins 2 and it's Mass Effect 2 level glow-up. And I use Mass Effect 2 very deliberately in this example.

Mass Effect - without diving down /that/ particular rabbit hole in this already lengthy and rambling "review" and/or stream-of-consciousness - is...an amazing entry into the gaming and science fiction world. Much beloved in its time and, especially the trilogy as a whole, held up as one of the best Science Fiction franchises of all time. Deservedly so. (I may do a write-up on ME...4? when it hits but that's typing for a different day). And Mass Effect 2 took the core DNA of Mass effect and, arguably, refined and distilled it into an even more impressive package. Yes there was RP "stuff" missing in the end product but many people, and me among them, hold ME2 as the pinnacle of the entire trilogy.

Sins 2, even after only 3 hours, does that - and more.

It's one of those increasingly rare examples where - at least so far - the Devs didn't "mess it up." They didn't throw out everything that worked to try to cram in something "new and improved" that throws off everything everyone loved about the original. Or try to make it more like X or Y because X and Y sold 430 billion copies last year so we have to try to be like them to beat it!!!oneoneoneeleventy.

Sins 2 is Sins of a Solar Empire. Unabashedly. Unashamedly. And entirely. And yet it is also an evolution on the existing underlying structure that speaks to a self-aware knowledge of the core reasons those of us who played Sins...played Sins /for/. Why the game continued to live year after year, why the modding community remained active. Why the game /itself/ remained active despite releasing February 8th of 2008.

Or to put it back in Mass Effect terms. Sins 2 is the ME3: Citadel version of a sequel.

It takes...5 minutes? 10 at the most? And then you feel it. If you've ever played Sins... you /feel/ it. It's both Sins and yet /not/. But the ways that it's /not/ improve on the original concepts and ideas in ways that you would have never even thought to improve them by.

The animations are so much more improved that it's laughable to compare them. Weapon effects light up against ships. The turrets /move/. The guns /move/. The models are both the same and yet updated and advanced and /evolved/ to where they are now. Ships that look odd in still shots look absolutely perfect in space and in motion.

But it's more than that. Research trees have been shifted around and added to. Things you would have never though about have been improved (no more civ vs military 8/8 orbital structures to balance now it's just once but the system has been improved and expanded even further). They just updated how the fleet structure works and it works the way we all probably wanted it to work back in Sins 1 but probably never would have even thought to even suggest how to improve it because of how "fine" and/or "comfortable" we were with the original system.

And more. Things I haven't explored. Things I haven't figured out and mastered. Things to come that I'm all but sure will be mind-blowing in scope and scale.

Will things change? Yes. Will there be things we - or I - probably don't like? Sure. Does everything need to be balanced? Of course. Does the game itself still need to finish being built? Unquestionably.

...and yet...

...and /yet/...

The underlying DNA is there. It's /entirely/ there. And not only is it there it's /improved./ And, more spectacularly than that, it's improved in a way that speaks to the Devs underlying understanding of why we all loved the original game.

3 hours and I'm here.

Is it too early to call this game a Masterpiece? Yes. Of course. Entirely. And yet I /have/ to do it because I feel it in my bones. I even ran it by my friend in discord who bought it a few days before me. Real talk:

Me: lol I have 3 hours and I'm posting a review on kbin and my first line is legit "Sins of a Solar Empire II is a masterpiece"
Him: Love it
Me: okay so I"m not crazy?
Him: Naw cause it's facts iit's a masterpiece and beautiful (heart eyes)

For literal years I would do a google search every few months seeing if there was any news about a Sins of a Solar Empire sequel. And up until a few months ago not only was there nothing there were other posts from other people (and review sites) all asking the same question. Where is Sins 2?

...well... it's here now. It's still in its infancy. It's still being built out and balanced and all the other things that come with a game that, not too long ago, was purely in a "technical preview" state.

But what's here? What's here is amazing. What's here speaks to the very core of why we all loved Sins in a love letter from the Developers to the fans... And it's one of the most terrifying time-suck games I've ever come across... that I can't wait to throw myself into and lose hundreds of hours of my life to.

Sins of a Solar Empire 2... Masterpiece.

--Reme