I got this game from Walmart, and took it home to install. The key didn't work for registration, triple and quadruple checked the back of the manual - I had the key correctly entered.
Once the game came up (the load time was terrible - took 20-30 seconds on an extremely high end computer), the graphics looked worse than Wing Commander. Seriously, the first space sim game I ever played had much better graphics than this. I set the options to as high as they would go, and it made absolutely no difference. I tried taking it back to Walmart, and they said they could only exchange it for the exact same thing. I ended up leaving the game on the counter and walking out.
I couldn't leave any comments on the company's game site because I couldn't register the game, and without an official account, there's no getting on the customer site.
I didn't get my money back from WalMart - $30 down the drain. Getting another copy would've been a complete waste - the game isn't worth playing - it's an eyesore.
It is 3D, but remembering back to Wing Commander, where the ships were really 2 dimensional, and only seemed to be 3D because they would change the image as you got "closer", I can honestly say that Wing Commander's graphics were more enjoyable and vastly easier to look at than this sack of shit game.
Thinking back to the box the game came in, the company was extremely dishonest. The box cover graphics were very well done and high end, as if the game had been created to current industry standards. This product's graphics would have been acceptable if it were done back before any other 3D space games ever came out.
I can't remember ever playing a game with a user interface that was this bad (at least one that didn't just crash when you started it). There have been some games I've played where the camera only functions at certain angles and you have to switch between the angles, and that's something that you get used to. In that case, it was an artistic choice. In this one, the developers should hire some real graphic artists before attempting another game, and they should also spend a lot of time studying other game user interfaces and letting other people test the game for them before releasing.
There are so many bad games out there that just want to chime in on the cheap buck. Then there are games with good intentions that simply miss the mark. That's how IGN feels about Shattered Suns. Somewhere, deep inside, there is a solid game waiting to break free. Unfortunately, Shattered Suns is ultimately an over ambitious game with perhaps not enough money, time, or resources to turn the experience into something out of this world.
Presentation - 4.5
Graphics - 4.0
Sound - 6.5
Gameplay - 4.5
Lasting Appeal - 4.0
Overall -
Considering that combat is as dull as the ship graphics, and that you can't even share the experience due to lack of multiplayer, Shattered Suns' $40 asking price is seriously overambitious.
CheatCC says: "Shattered Suns seems to have begun life as an overly-ambitious project, only to have the developers run out of steam (or money) somewhere along the way. It's a shell of a game. It fails at almost everything it attempts."
