VideoGamer: Sins of a Solar Empire Review

VideoGamer's Iain McCafferty:

"You might not think it to look at me, but I actually have something in common with James Bond. No, really. It's "The World is Not Enough". For Bond, it's a family motto. For me, it's more a symptom of my megalomaniac complex. Why would I want to bother piddling about conquering one pitiful little dirtball when there's an entire galaxy out there just waiting for my harsh, but ultimately fair, leadership? Sins of a Solar Empire offers just that opportunity of galactic domination you've been waiting for.

Sins of a Solar Empire isn't a standard real-time strategy, but what one of those self-consciously cool tech-evangelists would call a mash-up. It takes '4X' (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) gameplay, normally associated with turn-based strategies like Civilization, and marries it with a grand-scale real-time strategy, making the game play like a cross between Galactic Civilizations II and Supreme Commander. Obviously, the potential pitfalls of merging two genres like this are as huge as they are plentiful. Thankfully, Sins sidesteps the biggest ones, stumbling into only the odd interface niggle - but more on that later."

Gameplay: 8
Graphics: 7
Sound: 8 8/10