While Crying Suns does not deviate very much from the classic Space Odyssey formula, it is highly polished and executed well. The tactical layer is moderately interesting, with some decision making taking place but mostly testing the player's ability to adhere to a rigid formula defined by the parameters the battles are taking place in.
At the campaign level, the player has a reasonable degree of ability to build an engine which is a matter of managing the odds of getting good rewards from intrinsically random map design and encounters. There are some trade-offs to be made at shops and in the upgrade tree, but for the most part mistakes in these are fairly forgiving, even on the "hard" difficulty, since all purchases and upgrades have a pretty static and well balance positive value.

I found the story to be mildly interesting. There were a few twists that had me excited, but for the most part the universe consisted of a long string of loosely connected self-contained encounters.