I've got 10,000 problems but so far, frame-rate drops ain't one

Image credit: Enhearten Media

Sanctuary: Shattered Sun is the kind of unwholesomely large real-time strategy game where you keep accidentally auto-constructing 50 missile trucks because you were preoccupied with (e.g.) a massive spiderbot offensive on the other side of an ocean. Those things breed like rabbits! Still, easy come, easy go: simply charge your 50 superfluous missile trucks into the nearest line of energy domes, and watch as they, the enemy, and everybody we have ever loved disintegrates in about 20 seconds.

Shattered Sun does reward micromanagement – "every projectile is simulated", the devs proclaim, which means you can dance your tanks away from incoming shells – and also encourages resource efficiency, with a "flow-based economy" that hinges on access to generators and alloy extraction sites. But going by my hour with the demo, it more immediately rewards the act of scooping together a continent-sized deathball and rolling it through the nearest pocket of red on your map.

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The game lets you control up to 10,000 units at once, care of a zoom button that transmogrifies the warzone into a mess of squirming icons when you pull out. Why yes, it is inspired by Gas Powered's Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation. Developers Enhearten Media have even scored a Steam page quote from Gas Powered co-founder Chris Taylor, who tentatively hails Shattered Sun as a "spiritual successor".

Released a couple of days ago, the demo I've been playing is an early alpha build, and encompasses tutorials together with some early campaign levels. The premise is that three factions are waging war on the exterior of a Dyson Sphere – that is, a megastructure built around a sun for energy-harvesting purposes. If you're into the whole "mutually assured destruction" thing, you can slice away the crust to plunge your enemies into the star far beneath. You can also commandeer the Sphere's weather systems to freeze oceans solid, together with any fleets traversing them.

I have so far managed neither, but I've been having a good time manufacturing vast combined armies and slopping them across the map. As in the Gas Powered projects above, you're handed a commander unit with a mix of raw firepower and construction abilities. This queen bee must be kept safe at all costs, but it's always tempting to deploy your commander as a base-building vanguard.

While the HUD is a little hard to decipher, with lots of obscure unit portraits to mouse-over during construction, the controls feel quite sturdy and considered. You can, for example, drag-select a bunch of military units without enlisting any non-combat engineers tucked in amongst them. I also enjoy what I've seen of that "flow-based economy". You can tether factories together for efficiency, with lower-tier factories helping fully upgraded plants chew through production of more advanced vehicles.

As for the inevitable worries about performance, I wasn't conscious of any serious frame-rate drops on the office PC I use for beefier reviews - an i7 12700F with an Nvidia RTX 3060. If you're interested, the devs have written at length about how they'll avoid gunking up the workings with extraneous blast clouds, missile exhaust, burning foliage and so forth. You can find the demo on Steam. Go on, crack open a Dyson Sphere for me. The full game launches in August 2027.