Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows
Sword of the Stars: A Murder of Crows is the newest expansion to the strategy game based out in the stars, the expansion delivers a bit of a change to the game with plenty of new features.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 21/25,
Gameplay: 18/25,
Creativity 20/25,
Fun 21/25
Total: 80/100
I really wish I had more time on my hands and could devote weeks to this game as it is fun and quite addicting to me but alas I have more work and must press on with my conquering of the universe around me. Sword of the Stars is a deep and often time consuming game that grows on you, the expansion Born in Blood added more features as well and now we have the next expansion to the game, A Murder of Crows.
It would be really hard for anyone to pick up either game and really tell where the expansion start and the base game ends, they did a great job of adding in all the features. A Murder of Crows adds new technology trees, a new race and new scenarios for a great addition to Sword of the Stars.
Sword of the Stars is a great space based strategy game with a universe over view and turn based strategy but with battles being played in real time. You control not only your research, fleets and colonies but real time battles of those fleets for some fast paced action.
One thing that just draws me into this game for the great gameplay is all the possibilities and how you can broaden what your approaches are to everything in the games strategy and tactics. You can work toward better technology or run a few fleets with basic weapons and try your luck at colonizing some close planets but risk the money loss if they get attacked by a better force.
Sword of the Stars and the expansion A Murder of Crows plays very well whether you’re playing the scenarios with their general storyline or the open games where you pick and choose the players and other setups of the game. One really nice feature with this is the deep gameplay that you really can just jump into and figure out as you play along.
You do not have to read pages of manuals getting to know all the various ins and outs of the technology or economy as they left much of the micromanagement out and gave you a simple economy and tech tree system. You start off a game, either scenario or the open games, by working toward the goals of colonizing or just surviving by building ships, researching technology and colonizing planets.
Some of the scenarios don’t have all this but they basically have the build a fleet or using your fleet in space so you have to be able to manage the ship design and building sections. You also have the technology that works very well with some pretty common stuff like various nuclear weapons, lasers and a whole host of others in logical laid out section trees.
The base game is fun if you like strategy based games that take a long time to play, most of the scenarios or the games you create yourself will take days to play through instead of a few hours. The expansion A Murder of Crows adds three scenarios and a new race for a few extra scripted gameplay events as well as a host of other features.
The expansion brings in new weapons and technology with an additional 2 whole trees for a new Drone and Xeno-Culture section. The Drone is just what it sounds like while the Xeno Culture is a new tree that adds things like translating alien languages and understanding them more.
Many of the new features are nice but with the wide variety already available it might make makes for more of a good thing but they carefully thought out all the additions and made good selections everywhere. The new sections add more variety and more ways to build and defeat other races or achieve your various goals. One great addition is the planets having civilians that affect your planets in various ways like civilians can revolt against the military.
Some of the new features like being able to group ships or call a joint cease fire to preserve what ships you have left are nice. The new ship types add more variety to your specific goals and you can even design new ones with the various new sections they have added.
All the added features make for even more variety to the game so you have a better way to work toward your goals but things are not so complicated that things get confusing either. One of the common ideas with this expansion is adding to the general game world and how things happen like adding civilians and independent worlds.
Others like ship designs add in ways that make sense, you can build a construction ship that allows you to build your space stations. The space stations have to be built by something so they added the ships that build them to your strategy and even the battle modes.
While these are great for building ships they are completely defenseless so in battle you may want to add some extra firepower near them for their protection. Other additions to the overall gameplay like AI control of neutral planets that you may stumble upon during your exploration add believability to the game with a realistic approach to the universe here.
A Murder of Crows adds much to an already good game and with the two expansion packs you should have plenty of gameplay for even the most diehard fans of space strategy games fans. A Murder of Crows adds a lot to Sword of the Stars and is a great expansion to the base game.