FTL: Faster Than Light was one of those games like Left 4 Dead that managed to capture a very specific fantasy and it hasn’t truly been replicated by similar games that came after it. In FTL‘s case it had essentially created the perfect Star Trek game with randomized diplomatic situations, boarding parties, power transfers, crew assignments, and many other tiny features that all went perfectly together to create an experience that hasn’t be properly done since. So essentially what I’m saying is that you should go play FTL, but if you’ve already done that to death and want to try something similar you might want to look into Crying Suns, a Kickstarted, Humble Bundle-published game that came out about two and a half years ago.
On paper FTL and Crying Suns are very similar, as both start with you picking a ship with limited customization options and heading out into the vastness of space with limited resources. Fuel is always a worry in these games, as is the amount of “scrap” you’ll need to both upgrade your ship and buy said fuel or other supplies as you move through a given sector of the universe. As you go you’ll encounter other ships with people either looking to kill you, sell you things, or are desperate for help and you have to decide if your finite amounts of scrap, fuel, and even the lives of your crew are worth risking for the rewards that could be gained from the encounters … or if you just want to be a nice guy in the hopes that it might pay you back in unforeseen ways down the line. Anyone that’s played FTL will be immediately familiar with this set dressing, but there’s a few key ways that Crying Suns is different and in those areas your mileage may vary.
General gameplay in combat is the most immediately obvious difference between these two sci-fi games, with FTL focusing much more on capital ship combat while Crying Suns is much more about starfighter combat. Rather than micromanaging your ship’s crew and power systems as you and the enemy ship bombard each other with mounted weapons, Crying Suns has you micromanaging flights of one to four starfighter groups across a grid in the center of your screen while you and enemy’s primary ships occasionally pelt each other or the grid with your mounted guns. In some ways this becomes even more strategic than FTL, as rather than simply worrying about weapon targeting, crew assignments, and boarding parties you now have to be constantly aware of a strategic battlefield where the positioning of your starfighters matters almost as much, if not more, than the damage you’re dealing to the enemy ship itself. Should you retreat back with your damaged craft to heal after a successful skirmish or should you push on to deal damage to the main vessel? It’ll take ten seconds to cross the distance to start shooting the enemy but they’ll be launching new fighters in twelve seconds, so is the two seconds you’ll have to start shooting the capital ship worth it? Should you sneak a stealth ship around the back of the enemy combatants for extra damage at the risk of having a smaller force facing the ships the enemy is sending? These and many other questions can come up and fortunately the game has a “tactical pause” for whenever you want to take a moment to consider your options.
Starfighter combat itself is pretty straightforward since it is dictated by a rock-paper-scissors mechanic that makes one ship class better than another ship class which can beat the third ship class, but a lot of the strategy comes from utilizing a mixed fleet as your “rocks” move against their “scissors” while avoiding their “paper” that is intercepted by your own “scissors”. Starfighters have a very hard time retreating once they’re engaged in combat, and when one is destroyed it will respawn in your hanger bay after a short while in a “patched” state, where it is permanently stuck at half health with each use from then on until it’s repaired. Immediately this is a much easier and less punishing form of combat than you might find in FTL or even games like XCOM where a destroyed resource is gone forever, plus outside of some very specific types of abilities the “patched” status doesn’t do anything other than make the ships half as durable, and it’s rarely worth it to invest in fixing them since even a patched “rock” can take out a full health “scissors.”
The lack of focus on the capital ship side of things also occasionally makes Crying Suns feel a little less refined in other areas. Ship weapons have very long cooldowns in between when they can fire and most of the time a weapon can only hit a ship or a starfighter but not both, limiting your strategic options since your available weapons can generally only hit either one thing or the other. Speaking of limited tactics, Crying Suns also doesn’t have FTL‘s depth when it comes to attacking and destroying the systems of enemy vessels, as there are only three categories of ship systems (weapons, hull, and hanger bay) and you can only “overheat” those systems rather than outright destroying them into uselessness. This generally means that any attempt to disable a ship system is only temporary as the overheat will inevitably diminish, unlike in FTL when you could consistently leave an enemy’s shields or weapon systems inoperative with focused fire on that part of the enemy vessel (again, very Star Trek). Even assigning focused fire is questionable in Crying Suns, as unlike in FTL you can’t just have weapons auto fire every time they’re off cooldown at a pre-designated target and instead have to manually fire your weapons every time they’re available.
Assigning crew to specific stations on the ship is also very one dimensional, as it’s just a box with a character’s image rather than an actual work station that’s physically inside the ship. Your crew in Crying Suns can also have a handful of special abilities that affect various ship systems, but without any enemy boarding parties to harass your crew you don’t have to think of anything like defensive positioning and can just slap those postage stamp pngs in wherever they make the most sense. Crew members are also very one dimensional in that, most of the time, their special abilities only work on one of your ship’s systems, so you automatically know you should assign them to that system rather than every potential crew member being able to help in all parts of the ship like in FTL. Your crew also comes with passive attributes that come into play during special encounters or, more generally, during “away missions” where you send a squad of soldiers down with a crew member to search a planet for resources. There is a ton of randomness in these planet exploring segments, from how many soldiers you’ll lose to how many resources you’ll gain while you’re down there, and fortunately you’re given that range of percentages before you set out to explore. Success and failure is dictated entirely by random chance and how many attributes your chosen crew member has, but at the end of the day these are some of the blandest parts of Crying Suns since so much of it is out of your hands and you will almost always get more out of it than you put in since soldiers are so cheap at the store.
The other big difference between Crying Suns and FTL is that Crying Suns is heavily plot focused, sometimes frustratingly so. FTL was very short and to the point with its plot, limited to an introduction in the beginning and a big final boss at the end, with scatterings of dialogue from enemy units. In many ways this is ideal, especially in a roguelike where you’ll be replaying similar encounters over and over again. Crying Suns however is all about its plot, from explaining how you keep dying (cloning at the edge of the universe) to giving you the option to constantly interrogate everyone you meet about the reason everything has gone to hell: every machine in the universe suddenly turning off. At first it’s an interesting enough mystery, and you might even be so inclined cross examine every man, woman, and child in your path about it, but as you warp from one galaxy to another and everyone knows nothing, it gets a little stale.
Unfortunately, stale is something that does start to permeate Crying Suns as you move on through the story. Roguelikes live and die on variety, be it variety of tools you can use or variety of challenges that you encounter, and Crying Suns unfortunately is somewhat lacking in this regard, especially if you end up dying more than a few times. Combat starts to feel relatively samey in the lead up to the end game, especially since you suffer few consequences for doing it poorly due to the limited impact from losing your starfighters and your capital ship auto heals damage after each fight. The space you fight in is also incredibly repetitive, with the most variety they could think of being stationary asteroids or neutral weapon emplacements that you can capture, which is relatively disappointing compared to the nebulas, asteroid belts, and solar flares that would hinder you and create dangerous battlefields in FTL. You’ll also find a seemingly infinite amount of medical stations, child runaways, people with escaped aliens on their ship, and a whole host of other very … let’s charitably call them “familiar” problems as you move through the stars. Every roguelike has these problems the more you play them and Crying Suns shouldn’t suffer for the crimes of the whole genre, but their toybox feels oppressively small compared to others, perhaps because the story is so omnipresent that dialogue between you and those you meet is much easier to remember since you have the same conversation with every lunatic on a space station that claims he knows why the robots turned off. Nice try buddy, but I got scammed by you two galaxies ago and I’m not going to fall for it again.
Visually the game is relatively unambitious, but it does do a few things I enjoy. The capital ship designs are impressively vast and ominous, both in shape and color, and the game does a cool thing where they explode and slowly fall off the screen when they’re destroyed, which makes the space outside your ship feel much more present than just a static image. The game also uses that bridge view to personalize your crew a little more than other games with NPC helpers like FTL or XCOM, as your crew will react to your requests for their insight during random events. However that also leads to some repetition as every soldier and scientist has the same dialogue as the rest, even with the unique crew members you can unlock, but if the game had more content on a loop there wouldn’t be that problem so I’m just retreading the same issue.
In the end, Crying Suns is one of the easiest roguelikes I’ve ever played, with limited punishment for failure, free fuel, and checkpoints between galaxies, but it also temporarily filled the void in my heart left by no other games being like FTL. Like I said at the top you should absolutely play FTL if you haven’t already and have even a passing interest in strategy games, science fiction, roguelikes, or Star Trek, but if you’ve done that already then Crying Suns is a good, if poorly realized, place for the same sort of experience. Check it out if you want that itch scratched like I did.
