Having been brought up with classics of 4X galactic conquest (The 4 Xs stand for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) like Master Of Orion, Birth Of The Federation and Imperium Galactica, I might be a bit spoiled and gotten my hopes up too much over what everyone was saying for Sins. It's a good game, there's no doubt of that, but it feels less like a strategic conquest, more like a big, strung out skirmish, with heavy emphasis on eXterminate and not the other 4 X's. The options for building up planets under your control are very limited. Basically all there is is “Upgrade Population”, which increases credit revenue “Upgrade max number of Civilian/Military Buildings” which does just that, and “Explore Planet”, the latter of which sometimes reveals artefacts which give your faction a bonus.

Diplomacy also seems to be pretty broken, and shallow. Your opponents will give you “Missions”, which are basically just cold-call demands for money/resources or killing X number of Y opponent's Z's, which, if completed will make them like you more. Blowing up their ships doesn't seem to miff them very much, nor does putting outposts/fleets too close to their borders, (like in a game such as Birth Of The Federation), and I find it disappointing that you can't actually make any demands of THEM.

Hopefully if they choose to make an expansion, or sequel for the game, they'll add in the depth they missed out on, but I won't hold my breath. Master Of Orion 2 and Birth Of The Federation have held their age well and they still run on XP so I'll keep my lust for galactic conquest sated with them for now.

Boring! Actually, boring and not particularly challenging either. For the most part, victory comes down to a case of “I have more ships than you, so I'm going to smear your sorry carcass all over the galaxy!” Or variations on this theme, such as “I've spent the entire game paying the pirates to harass your shipping and raid your worlds, and while they've been doing that I've been building a fleet bigger than the Borg Collective!”

The different races aren't terribly different. The humans employ vessels that are rather dull and industrial-looking but generally good all-rounders. The psychic mutants use ships fitted with a lot of fancy beam weaponry but their overall durability is somewhat lacking. And the last kid in the galactic sandpit, the ugly extraterrestrials, field a variety of very tough ships, but you have to take out a second mortgage on all your planets in order to build anything resembling a battle-ready fleet.

The playing field, or galaxy in this instance, which you can make as big or as small as you like, generally dictates the length of the game. Larger galaxies will necessitate locking yourself in your room for the next six months while wearing adult undergarments. Diplomacy is a case of “Do this for me and I might be your friend for a bit; at least until you start refusing my ludicrous demands or failing in your assigned tasks, after which I’ll show up at your nearest planet with a fleet of heavily-armed battleships.”

No single-player campaign means no story-based missions. Each race has a vaguely intriguing backstory, but other than that the entire game is one giant skirmish. Skirmishing is fun… for a while. Then it just gets mind-numbingly dull. A bit like this game.

It is a Massivly impressive game, the graphics are awsome, the gameplay becomes tedious however after a few hours of gameplay, as there are no missions. Enemy AI also becomes tiresome as they flee in the face of a larger fleet causing you to have to chase them through systems untill you can corner or hit them with a pincer manouver.