Alright, I don't normally write customer reviews but this product motivated me to do so. Yes, it was that bad.
First I will go over the positive points of this game. It does some interesting things, with planets orbiting the sun and moons orbiting their planets. It lends a very realistic feel to the solar system and for a sci-fi buff like me, it’s nice to see. The graphics for the planetary bodies are also pretty good. That said there are several points which turned me off to Shattered Suns almost from the start. Staying on graphics for a minute, the ship and station models are decent if a bit low-res on the texture side… but it won’t really matter because at any useful zoom level for commanding your ships, they will all look like tiny colored dots anyway. You will go entire games without even seeing your ships or stations.
The first thing you will notice when you enter the tutorial is the atrociously designed camera controls. The camera operates as though it is on a fixed rail with the mouse wheel as the elevation controls. It takes several minutes of finicky adjustment to get the view you want. Because of the difficult camera controls, it is also hard to keep tabs on what your opponents are doing in the rest of the solar system. Aside from a clicking back and forth on the tiny minimap which shows the current planetary alignment, there is no good way to look around the solar system. Manually moving the camera will more often than not just confuse you, as the planets are constantly in motion and nothing is where you remember it. This game sorely needed a sensor manager type overview map, ala homeworld.
My second nitpick is that the planets are almost wholly useless. They have exactly two uses in the game. The first is that you can dock ships to them, and you can hide behind them for cover. (This is negated if your opponent is smart enough to attack from above, as the tutorial helpfully points out) Docked ships can mine the planet if you included miners on the ship design, and will deliver resources to whichever station you choose. This means that there is no colonization or management of planets as is standard in games of this genre, in fact there is no interaction whatsoever with the planets/moons other than orbiting or mining them or ordering up a new station.
The third reason I had to dislike the game was that nothing is shared. If you mine 100 crystal on the planet furthest from the sun, you have to send a ship out there to haul it back. That’s not so bad really; I can deal with a realistic economy. My problem is that they don’t give you the tools to manage your economy the way you want to. You see, the way you move resources (crystal, ore, and credits) from one station to another is you select a ship with cargo holds and tell it to trade. You pick two stations and it will equalize the resources between them. What that means is, if you build a new station out on Pluto and start mining crystal, and tell your trade ships to start trading between it and your main construction base; it will start shipping materials out to Pluto. Why? Because your main base will likely have more material than the newly built base around Pluto. So either you must wait for Pluto to have more resources than your main base, or deal with your trade ships carting off half your resources to the outer edge of the solar system. Personally, I don’t want a stockpile of material out where I can’t use it… and as soon as you build something large at your main base, the ships will start carting all of it back in. It seems like such a waste of effort, moving it there and back, and I found no way to force them into a one-way transfer or any way to manually control the trading. So if you want to amass 5000 ore at your main construction base, you must wait until ALL BASES trading with it are at or near 5000, because until then your ships will just keep carting the ore away to less fortunate stations. In that same vein, research is not shared either as far as I could tell. If you research level 2 beam weapons at one station; that is not reflected at other stations.
My final issue is with the ship customization which was mentioned many times in the game description. Ship customization is a misnomer, because all you do is pick some numbers. You click one of your design slots, set engines to 3 and beam weapons to 5 and you’re done. There are no ship sizes, no special equipment, nothing to distinguish your ships from anyone else’s with the same number combination.
In essence, this game is rough, unpolished, and lacking any sort of vision or creativity. Playing it against another person becomes an exercise in futility as you struggle against boredom waiting for resources to be moved around so you can build your combat vessels, which are later destroyed and rebuilt because there is no way to refit old ships with new technology. The game has a very smooth engine and some good idea, but doesn’t deliver the entertainment it promises.