There is no game here.

User Rating: 1 | Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter PC
Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter is a broken pile of ideas that do not cohere into anything worth playing, much less buying. Both the publisher and the developer have apologized for this mess, and have promised to make things right, but the game is in such poor shape it isn't worth buying (especially at full price) until all of the bugs are officially worked out, and the user interface made much less incomprehensible.

The word 'disaster' springs to mind.

Save your money, watch for patches, jump in when the time looks right. As of this moment I don't see that time coming any sooner than six months from now. This game was born unwhole and mangled.

As of this review the game crashes for large numbers of players. User interface issues include the inability for players to know what type of ship they are building, because the labels were never put into the interface. The tech tree is hard to navigate, and quite a chore to use. Certain information windows that should be situated off to the side sit directly over the main screen play-area, blocking and covering the solar systems and fleets the player needs to interact with. Entire sections of the game are unfinished, with several windows providing no information whatsoever, they are just blank sheets of nothing. Information that *is* available is shuffled away into very obscure and awkward places, making the game overly complex to derive any useful data from. There are so many more issues with this game that it would take much too long to document here in a single review.

Also, certain key features, like automated ship battles (if a player does not want to manually manage a battle), force the player to watch the battle take place, giving the player the opportunity to see just how poor the A.I. is in this game, as his fleet manages to do the most incomprehensible things. Rather than being an automated quick battle, it is merely a sped up normal battle, out of the players control, and with much less skill and intelligence involved.

There are many more issues, but these should suffice for now. This one needs a lot longer to bake.