Falling Stars: War of Empires Reviews

Fun, but not what I was expecting.

If you like Twilight Imperium, this game does Twilight Imperium pretty good. It has 4 instead of 17 factions. Id love more factions. Still, its a fun game, its fast too if you want it. Thats why I love it, its a fast 20 min Twilight Imperium experience. GREAT!

I don't play a lot of computer games, but I do play a lot of board games. Falling Stars is a great bridge. It allows me to enjoy the feeling of playing a complex board game even when I don't have friends over for a game night. Beautiful and extremely intuitive for those who play Twilight Imperium.

Seems like the beginning of a good game, needs to fix the issues with it crashing though.

If you are like me, your first hour with a game determines a lot. This game fails at that. I was intrigued by the similarities with Twilight Imperium and the game just seemed like it had so much potential. Unfortunately, the UI destroyed it for me. Key to this game is loading troops onto carriers and moving out into the universe. Sadly, there seems to be no way of knowing which of your carriers actually have troops. This made the game start totally frustrating and I was lost there. It was a bit like if you started a game of Civilization for the first time and were totally excited by the environment and concept but when you went to build a second city, your settler would only move in random directions. I desperately hope they finish this game. Seems like something great hiding here. REVISION -- They did a patch so I gave this another try. Initially, I thought they had fixed the carrier UI problem but on turn 2 of the game, it simply wouldn't let me move ground troops at all. Said my carrier was full when it wasn't. Still not there. (To carry forward my earlier analogy, now my settlers don't move in random directions, they just don't move).

A really fun game that draws inspiration from many of the greatest 4X board games! However, it's a little buggy and dated graphically, so I'd probably wait for a discount.

Comparing this casual, relatively simple game to 'Star Ruler 2' and 'Stellaris' is very unfair. The latter two are very complex, longer-to-play games. The designers of 'Falling Stars' never intended and advertised it as such. They conceived and promoted a simple, casual game which is easy to learn and easy to complete under an hour of time. The problem of the lack of information concerning "carriers" (which transport ground troops or fighters) has been adressed on the game's Steam forum, and it has been promised to be resolved in a patch, soon. The problem of pricing is a legitimate one. It is advertised as CAN$ 44 and I bought it at its reduced launch-price of $ 33, which some customers might still consider too high. A valid point. If the game's developers have made a pricing mistake, they will have to re-evaluate. It is not for me to say, especially since I can afford to buy both 'Falling Stars' and 'Stellaris'. But to come back to my very first point: those two games cannot be fairly compared. I will eventually play both games, depending on my mood and on the time I have. I predict that 'Stellaris' will be more time-consuming, and I am not always in the mood to manage complicated pieces of software. Somewhat between those games, in terms of complexity, is the remake of 'Master of Orion' -- which I love to play for nostalgia's sake. If you have the cash at hand, I recommend the three of them, and also, 'Offworld Trading Company'. In the end, it is a question of mood and of available time for gaming. Each Steam customer has his own equation concerning those gaming parameters, but if you have the cash, what the L : purchase all of them :))

Although this game was cheap ($9) on sale, I don't think it's even worth that. The gameplay is odd, and the waiting time for the AI to play its turn is ridiculous. After about turn 20-25 I was waiting 3-4 minutes on an i9-9900k with a RTX 2080. It's just the AI mucks around for so long and seems to have far more army movement than you do. There is also no capacity to modify any of your ships and there are only 4 types. ie: Fighter's, Carrier's, Cruiser's and Dreadnought's. There is 1 troop type. It's a very simple game, where your planets generate resources every turn, and you spend it on building more ships (instantly) or research (instantly). You can only move your Army 1 space at a time and can split it manually to go into different directions but you can complete your turn in seconds while the AI takes minutes for the 3-4 opponents I chose to play against. It would be a nightmare in terms of waiting for more than 5. Not recommended at all, plenty of space games out there that are far better.

The game is in the early stages, but very playable and almost gives me that Conquest of Elysium 4 but in space feeling, with much more stratedy involved. It's a 4x "lite" game, which isn't a bad thing. You can jump right into a quick game on default settings or make the map much bigger for longer, more drawn out games. There are plenty of start up options to choose from. The AI seems very competent and I've lost more matches than I have won so far. The developer has already released the first patch and another one is on the way in a day or two. They take feedback well and have been active on the forums. I've had bug or two, but was immediately contacted so they could take a look at the log files. I know some have complained about the UI, but I find it very easy to learn and utilize. If you are looking for a space - 4x lite - type game you can tailor to a quick 30 minute game or expand to a much longer game, give FS: WOE a look. I have no doubt it's going get better and better. There are some youtube videos you should check out if you are on the fence.

Major Issue: Carriers absolutely cannot move unless they're carrying something. Why? There's no logical or gameplay reason for this. I end up with carriers being stranded all over the map, because it's not worth the effort to send another carrier to go get them. Minor Issues: This far after launch, there's still some annoying bugs, like the fact that you can't research some technologies, even with the prerequesites for them, or you can, but they show up as grayed out, as if you could. Also, carriers still are listed as having "movement: 1" even after I researched the movement upgrade. The game makes you watch battles that don't affect you, and you can't even tell who's who until after the battle is over. They're kind of boring to watch too. Battles in general could be more interesting. The game falls a little flat on aesthetics: The whole look for the fleets is a little off, some species have "fighters" that look like cap ships on the map, the ground units for some look like they're carrying musical instruments instead of weapons. It's not all bad, and I like the concept of a "Twilight Imperium" like computer game, but the dealbreaker for me is the carrier issue. I may change my review if they patch this.