Sins of a Solar Empire really needs a demo, but as an indie shop I imagine that shipping product was paramount. There will be a demo in about a month I understand, so it's been taken into consideration. Sins is what we typically think of as a 4x game, but it has its own ideas about what that should mean in a modern context. Sword of the Stars has a firm delineation between its "empire" and its "combat" facets, resolving each in a sequential manner. Sins attempts to suspend all of these elements in linear time, but it's a slow, sweet kind of time, like molasses. I'm a person who prefers turn-based deliberation over der klickenfest, but at the default gamespeed I've never felt overwhelmed by what was asked of me. Using the (by now) ultrarefined conventions of the RTS genre, they make serious civic engineering as mechanically simple as Bloodlusting your ogres. The game's crowning achievement is, at least to me, what they call "The Empire Tree." In screenshots it always looked like a mess, but it's what makes the game possible, and it works extremely well. It's a kind of shorthand for your entire empire, a dynamic representation that tells you where everything is, how many of it there are, who is under attack, at all times. It's a savvy answer to a pernicious question, and it's tactfully delivered.