Crying Suns is a rogue-like that draws its gameplay heavily from FTL and its story from the Dune series. Having loved both of these things, I was eager to dive into the game. I found a game made by people who clearly loved the works that inspired Crying Suns, but that couldn’t quite live up to the bar it set for itself.
On its surface, Crying Suns appears to be a deeper, more story-driven rogue-like than FTL or similar games. Sadly, once you dive in, much of that depth proves illusory and the story, while interesting, often fails to carry you through the drudgery of the gameplay. This is not to say that the gameplay is awful, just far more shallow than it first appears. You’ll see everything the game has to offer in this regard within your first hour or so of playing. After that, you’ll mostly be retreading the same ground, grinding to unlock the next bit of the story.
The story is the strong point of the game. You are Ellys Idaho, legendary admiral of the Empire, on a mission to discover what disaster has befallen it. Or, rather, you are a clone of Ellys Idaho, possessing the technical knowledge and skills of the original but none of his other memories. This narrative element creates a sense of mystery and unease and offers an explanation for why an accomplished military leader needs everything about the world explained to him.
The uneasy feeling is only increased by your teacher, Kaliban. A super-smart (he won’t let you forget it) and sentient robot known as an OMNI, Kaliban exudes menace and ill-concealed condescension as he catches you up on events in the Empire. The OMNIs, on which the Empire and all of humanity have become dependent, have mysteriously shut down, throwing the Empire into chaos as systems become isolated from one another and all industry grinds to a halt. Kaliban, the only surviving OMNI, doesn’t know what happened but he does know the immortal Emperor Oberon had planned for such a disaster. That’s why Kaliban, along with countless clones of Idaho and other military officers, soldiers, scientists, etc. were secretly hidden on the outskirts of the empire, waiting to be woken and set to work when disaster occurred. That’s where you come in.
As a clone of a hero of the Empire, you must command a battleship, operated by a cloned crew, as it makes its way through a crumbling Empire. Fending off pirates, mutants, and crazy cults, among other dangers, you must solve the mystery of what happened to the OMNIs and find a way to turn them back on. It’s a solid story, and fans of Dune and other sci-fi and fantasy works will have a good time noticing all the references to classic pieces. An immortal emperor and a clone named Idaho are clearly Dune references. Oberon’s name could be a nod to Game of Thrones or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’m inclined to assume it references the latter as Kaliban is another Shakespeare reference (spelled Caliban in The Tempest)
If you’re a fan of darker sci-fi and especially if you enjoy the genre’s classics, the story of Crying Suns will likely resonate with you. Sadly, the story beats are too few and too spaced out to keep you engaged. You only get a fair bit of story at the beginning and end of every sector you travel through (think how jumping from sector to sector worked in FTL). The time you spend exploring planets within each sector (the meat of the game) doesn’t give you as much to engage with. You’ll occasionally meet a compelling character who reveals a cool detail about the world, but you’re more likely to encounter an enemy ship and have a fight.
Further, as this is a rogue-like, you’ll be dying and running through sectors multiple times; you’ll quickly find yourself experiencing the same encounters, which will suck any sense of wonder or discovery out of them. In the end, there’s not enough story to carry you forward. You simply fall into the grind of the gameplay. Sadly, while initially fun, the gameplay is just not interesting enough to keep you coming back.
Ship combat is enjoyable and breaks with FTL enough to be a novel experience. Where FTL made you feel like the commander of the enterprise, overseeing the operation of your ship, deciding when and where to fire weapons and deploy probes while monitoring the status of shields, engines, etc. as well as the crewmembers themselves, Crying Suns feels more like you’re Admiral Ackbar. You sit in your command ship and fire its big gun (or another superweapon) while focusing most of your attention on maneuvering your smaller fighters. They engage with enemy fighters, attempt to attack the enemy command ship, and defend their own. What you get is a relatively basic real-time strategy (with pause) experience. You move your small supply of fighter units around (dealing with environmental obstacles and hazards) and fighting enemy ships.
There are a few different types of fighters; each has its strengths and weaknesses, setting up a rock-paper-scissor scenario. You can play around with different combinations of fighters and big guns (although this is limited by what you find in a playthrough) but there isn’t enough to keep these fights interesting in the long-run. You’ll encounter all the significant variations of ships quickly and discover what works in different circumstances. You’ll experience a couple of environmental hazards and realize they don’t affect the combat too significantly. You’ll find a few different superweapons for your command ship and learn that most are useless (why do I want a laser that shoots in the form of an X on the battlefield when ships never line up in such a formation and I’ll never hit more than one or two at a time). Again, you’ll have seen everything there is to see in the first hour.
This is made worse by the developer’s bizarre decision to have your ship, crew, and equipment reset after every sector. It’s justified within the story but not in terms of gameplay. One of the best parts of a good FTL run was seeing your ship grow more powerful. It was thrilling to add new weapons and better shields, find new crewmembers, and gain better equipment. Further, acquiring so much stuff throughout a game allowed you to try out different strategies. Maybe you kept finding missile weapons in a playthrough, so you structure your strategy around them. Next time, perhaps you decide to focus on stealth and beam-weapons. There was always more to discover. In Crying Suns, you don’t get this depth.
A single sector is not nearly enough to discover lots of different equipment. You’ll find a few fighters, maybe a couple of superweapons and other pieces of equipment. You’ll work with them, no experimenting with different builds. It also means, in terms of gear, ships are as powerful at the end of the first sector as the final sector. The resets remove any sense of empowerment. No bringing a massively upgraded ship to the final battle — just one more boss fight at the end of one more sector like all the boss fights before it.
The ground missions, which were highlighted in previews, are another instance of an idea that sounds great on paper but ends up shallow and disappointing. The feature is sold as a chance to command a squad of ground-troops from space. Feel like a general, watch your soldiers progress across the terrain, listen to updates, monitor life-signs and issue orders to pull out if things get too hairy. In practice, the missions are far less exciting, requiring minimal input from the player and offering little in the way of surprise or suspense.
When you arrive at a planet that offers a ground mission, you are presented with a screen prompting you to select which officer will lead the away-team. That’s the only choice you will make when preparing for a mission. Further, any sense of suspense, strategy, or even real player agency is removed when this screen tells you, roughly, how each officer will perform if selected. You’re told whether a given officer will survive the mission unscathed or if there is a chance of them being wounded or killed. On top of this, you’re given estimates of how many resources you will scavenge and a range of soldier losses. These ranges can sometimes be considerably wide (knowing that between zero and nine of my ten soldiers will die isn’t that informative) but, by comparing the numbers across all your choices, the optimal selection is almost always pretty obvious. Ultimately, the only time you feel like you’re making a meaningful decision is when you have to decide between the officer that will bring back more resources at the cost of more deaths or play it safe. As this decision will generally be dictated by what you have more of at the time (resources or troops), it hardly feels like a choice at all.
Once your soldiers deploy, you have even less control over the outcome. You are presented with a new screen meant to simulate a commander’s logistics display. You watch a little dot representing your squad move across a map, stopping briefly to have random encounters. The outcome of these encounters is determined by which officer you sent to lead the mission. As you’ve already been informed approximately how successful the mission will be, and as the encounters resolve so quickly, no tension or excitement ever develops. At one point (or more if you’ve taken a pointless ship upgrade), your squad will stop and have the choice of withdrawing your team or ordering them to continue the mission. Retreat means sacrificing either any resources they’ve acquired or any wounded soldiers that will be left behind.
Despite sounding like a cool idea, there never really is a choice leading to a difficult decision. Going in, you know the upper range of how many soldiers will die, and you likely started the mission because you were alright with those losses. When that screen comes up, the mission’s state isn’t a surprise to you. This isn’t an XCOM battle where assignments unexpectedly turn sour, and you face with a choice between retreat or likely death for your beloved troops. It’s just the game asking for a button push to continue the path you’ve already selected to an outcome that is already known. I have not once issued a retreat order to my squad in all my time playing the game. Once again, you see everything there is to see of this system in the first hour (the first mission, really). After that, it’s just not interesting anymore.
In the end, Crying Suns pays homage to its chief gameplay and narrative inspirations but never comes close to equaling or surpassing them. This doesn’t make it a bad game, but it does make it forgettable. There isn’t enough story to carry through the gameplay, and there isn’t enough depth to that gameplay to keep you engaged over time. One of the major selling-points of rogue-likes is their replayability. Years after I first played it, I still load up FTL from time to time. I try out a different ship or strategy, see if I can discover a new storyline and unlock something I don’t have yet. When I finished Crying Suns and saw the end of its story, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back.
Verdict:
Fans of Dune and dark sci-fi should pick it up on sale, set it to the lowest difficulty to breeze through the gameplay, and enjoy the story. Fans of rogue-likes should play FTL again or look elsewhere for a new experience.
-Stephen Michaels