If there’s one thing missing from recent 4X space strategy games, it’s big, whopping fleet battles. What’s the point in spending hours researching technology, expanding your empire, and constructing gigantic intergalactic death fleets when the battles are ultimately resolved by a dice roll? Kerberos Productions hopes to satisfy our inner Horatio Hornblower with the new, unashamedly combat-focused, Sword of the Stars.

The space opera is light-hearted, letting you choose one of four kitsch alien species to command. On the surface, it looks and feels like any other 4X strategy game, with a strategic mode to control your empire, build fleets and designate research, and a tactical mode that zips you into a battle screen. But where games like Galactic Civilisations 2 or Masters of Orion featured diplomacy, trade networks, and political intrigue, SotS dilutes the strategy down to its base elements: ship building, research, and expansion.

The tactical map is just as streamlined, using basic RTS controls to issue orders. It’s a robust system that provides a surprising amount of control over your fleet. For the control freaks out there, you can even pause the game, zoom right down onto an enemy’s gun turret, and then order your fleets to attack just that component. Finally, the friendly AI does a decent job of handling the targeting and tracking.

Kerberos should be commended for injecting innovation into the genre, but it’s not perfect. The clunky tactical and strategic interfaces, for example, make simple tasks like upgrading your ships or finding out how damaged your ships are, far more difficult than necessary. Fortunately a patch has already been released to address some of the issues, but there’s a long way to go yet. Still, if you haven’t been served by 4X games lately, then give it a whirl. For everyone else, we recommend waiting for those future patches looming on the horizon.