SunAge

The main problem of SunAge is that without the patches released, the game is a disaster.

All in all this is a game that I still feel has potential. All the right aspects are there, but the spit and polish is missing the spit.

SunAge is an unpolished traditional RTS with a ho-hum storyline and numerous shortcomings, making it a tough sell, especially in the already crowded RTS genre.

With SunAge, it's really a question of whether you're willing to put up with clumsy UI and control scheme to play a game that, for the most part, feels like it was or could have been made 10 years ago, and even then it would have been a middling game.

This is a product developed as a labour of love for over a decade, with the core aim of bringing the RTS genre back to its roots, away from the glitz and glamour of 3D graphics and tacked-on RPG elements its creators claim have watered down the genre. Instead however, we end up with a half-finished product, brought to its knees by game-breaking bugs and the absence of key gameplay modes, which ends up looking considerably better than it plays.

A low-tech and rather uninspiring 2D RTS. [Mar 2008, p.108]

When I first started playing Sun Age, I felt a pang of nostalgia for the way games used to be, but it was quickly replaced by the feeling that this would have been a broken title even back then.

It's no fun beating up on the little guy, but whoever green-lighted the release of SunAge surely must have known that the release code was beta at best.

Well and truly eclipsed by the passage of RTS history. [Feb 2008, p.79]

It's hard to imagine that there is much of a market for a $30 sprite-based RTS for the PC today, much less one that's unstable and lacks any innovation.

Considering the game isn’t just dated but contains more bugs than MI5 (and we had the latest 1.05 version to review, so Christ knows what the unpatched code is like), not to mention the fact that this is the time of year when games aren’t going to sell because they’re merely very good instead of excellent, SunAge never stood a chance.

SunAge is a terrible RTS, lacking definition, originality, or fun, wrapped in a half-arsed story. Don't even think about it. [Mar 2008, p.82]