Netbook owners have the benefit of a solid decade of great real-time strategy games to draw from. RTS games tend to brush off fancy graphics in favor of a clear interface and user-friendly controls, and that means we get our pick of some of the best in the genre. But few recent RTSes have been as netbook-friendly as last year’s Sins of a Solar Empire, a vast game of galactic strategy that was designed specifically with older machines in mind.
Starting out in control of a single planet, you gradually branch out into different star systems, colonizing far-flung planets and harvesting their resources. Your growing dominion takes place in a lovely representation of 3D space, and managing your ever-expanding empire is unexpectedly smooth thanks to a user-friendly interface and a reasonable pace.
But “user-friendly” doesn’t have to mean “simple,” and Sins of a Solar Empire proves it with a wonderfully deep and complex tech- and unit-management system. However, Sins is disappointingly simple in one respect: It features no single-player campaign; instead, the game is structured entirely around multiplayer, and though the game includes computer-controlled opponents to battle when an internet connection isn’t available, the real meat of the game is online. But there’s a lot of meat there: Any given match can take literally hours to complete.
If galactic conquest is your cup of tea, you can check out a demo here, and download the full version at the official site. One big caveat, though: Though the game runs fine on underpowered machines, many of the menus are cut off at the standard netbook resolution of 1024 x 600. Fortunately, a user has developed a simple mod to work around the problem; you can grab it here.
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