TL;DR:
No, I don’t recommend this game. Sword of the Stars 2 is a confusing, overcomplicated mess that feels like the developers tried to reinvent the wheel—and ended up with a triangle.

Sword of the Stars 2: A Real Razor Review

If you’re here expecting the streamlined fun of the original Sword of the Stars, buckle up, because this sequel takes everything that worked and throws it into a black hole of overcomplicated mechanics. Want to move a fleet? Prepare for a scavenger hunt through obtuse menus and extra steps. Thinking about clicking and dragging to navigate the galaxy map? Forget it. Intuitive controls? Never heard of them.

The Shift from Simplicity to Chaos
Sword of the Stars 2 turns what should be an engaging 4X space strategy game into a frustrating exercise in patience. Moving a fleet? Here’s your process: Select the fleet (again, even if it’s already selected), sift through a menu of actions with vague names (why is it “relocate” instead of “move”?), confirm your choice, and THEN close the menu. Oh, and don’t forget to click “confirm” again just in case you enjoyed the redundancy.

And navigating the galaxy map? Instead of letting you click and drag like a normal human being, the game opts for a mystery control scheme that even the NSA couldn’t crack. Right-click? Nope. WASD? Wrong again. By the time you figure it out, you’ll have lost interest—or your sanity.

Notifications and Nagging
Every turn, the game delights in reminding you about “inactive fleets.” Thanks, I know they’re inactive—I left them there on purpose. A simple “Don’t show me this again” checkbox could’ve solved this, but instead, I’m bombarded with pop-ups like it’s Windows 98 trying to update. If the goal was to make me feel punished for leaving fleets idle, mission accomplished.

Menus: Where Immersion Goes to Die
Sword of the Stars 2 has a menu for everything: fleet manager, planet manager, diplomacy manager, station manager. While variety sounds good on paper, in practice, it’s like navigating the DMV of space games. Nothing flows. There’s no hotkey for escaping menus; instead, you have to click a tiny “close” button every time. Who thought this was a good idea?

Then there’s the encyclopedia. Calling it a mess is generous. It’s a maze of poorly designed tabs and sparse information. Want lore about a species? Tough luck. Expect a single, lazy sentence about their tech with none of the creative depth you’d hope for in a space game. Worse, the menu often breaks, freezing on the wrong screen or refusing to load. Did they even test this?

The Aesthetics - Blurry, Not Beautiful
While the ships and planets look decent, the background starscapes are a blurry, uninspired mess. Somehow, they managed to make space look bad—a feat I didn’t think was possible. The original game had better visuals in some areas, making this downgrade all the more baffling.

A Design Philosophy Gone Wrong
It’s clear the developers wanted Sword of the Stars 2 to feel more sci-fi, more futuristic, and more technical. Instead, they overthought everything and left out the fun. Instead of delivering the smooth turn-based flow of a Sid Meier’s Civilization, they created a game so foreign and alien, it’s barely playable. Immersion doesn’t mean burying basic functions under 10 extra steps.

A Broken Legacy
Surveying planets could’ve been immersive, but instead, it’s tedious. While I appreciate the ambition of including multiple planets per system, the execution feels like a chore. The charm and simplicity of the original game are gone, replaced by an overcomplicated mess of mechanics that don’t work well together.

Real Razor Recommendation?
No. Sword of the Stars 2 is a massive letdown. Its clunky interface, unintuitive mechanics, and glaring lack of polish make it a painful experience. If you’re nostalgic for the original, steer clear. This sequel breaks everything that made the first game fun and buries it under unnecessary complexity.

1/10. Huge disappointment. Save your money, and shame on the developers for this disaster.