14 DAY TRIAL // Lords of the Black Sun opens up like a Civilization video game, with a loading screen that chronicles the creation of the virtual world from scratch, and once the player goes past the menu, it’s pretty clear that the title is heavily inspired by Galactic Civilizations and other space-based 4X titles.
Players can choose a faction, each of them with unique strong and weak points, and then they need to colonize and develop planets, deal with minor races, design ships and then launch them, negotiate with enemy empires and maybe engage them in battle.
All of this needs to be done in order to continue expanding and gaining access to more living space, which in turn can be converted into more fleets and better technology.
Lords of the Black Sun includes some interesting and unique elements, like ministers and generals that can make fleets more effective, but the game does not offer one core mechanic that shakes up the foundations of the genre.
One interesting element of the game is the way it continuously delivers plenty of events to deal with and basically forces players to accept some negative outcomes because they never have the money they need in order to deal with all crises.
It’s a good idea to specialize planets as much as possible in Lords of the Black Sun, and initial placement and planet colonization are very important to overall game success.
The Artificial Intelligence powering the other empires does not seem particularly great, but the game already supports multiplayer and allows players to test their strategic skills against one another.
Lords of the Black Sun has a certain nostalgic charm at the moment, but it does need a few extra innovative ideas to really hook a player for a long period of time.
The early game also seems a little unbalanced, especially when it comes to how long research takes compared to building and exploration, which can lead to situations where the player just needs to continue to push End Turn for a while before something notable takes place.
Take a look at the attached image gallery and the video to see how Lords of the Black Sun looks in action.
The game is at the moment in Early Access on Steam, which means that a lot can change before it is fully launched and that all bugs present at the moment will be evaluated and solved.
