Second Sun

A strategy studio's first shot at a shooter

Second Sun is developed by Grey Wolf Entertainment, a studio previously known for 4X strategy games including Pax Nova and Dawn of Andromeda, and published by Netherlands-based Iceberg Interactive on 5 November 2025. It's a significant genre departure: players take on a Sunborn, a warrior with special abilities defending the fading Empire against the cult-aligned Order of the Second Sun in a civil war that's left the land ravaged. Structurally, it borrows heavily and openly from early-2000s shooter-RPG hybrids, pairing fast, movement-focused first-person combat with class abilities, weapon and armour loot, and procedurally generated dungeons scattered across an open, semi-linear valley map. Reviewers repeatedly describe the resulting blend as something like Diablo 2, Doom and Hellgate: London crossed together, a deliberately old-school combination the developers appear to have leaned into rather than smoothed over.

The charm of not overthinking it

A substantial share of Second Sun's review corpus responds warmly to precisely that lack of modern polish and complexity. Reviewers repeatedly describe the game as "fun bad" or unpretentious in a positive sense, praising a design that gets out of its own way: straightforward quests, a legible world map, a functional fast-travel system, and combat that rewards showing up and shooting rather than navigating deep systems. One detailed review frames this explicitly as a deliberate relief from what it calls "hyper ADHD 'git gud' elitist" modern game design, crediting Second Sun's simplicity as a feature for older or more casual players rather than a shortcoming. Gunplay draws the most consistent technical praise across the entire review base, described repeatedly as punchy, responsive and satisfying regardless of a reviewer's overall verdict, and sound design — particularly weapon audio — earns specific, repeated credit as stronger than the game's evident budget would suggest. A post- campaign "Infinity Tower" mode, offering repeatable high-difficulty dungeons for better loot, draws specific praise from reviewers who found themselves pulled back in just as the main story was wrapping up, and a playable demo that carries save progress into the full release earns real credit as an honest, low-risk way for prospective buyers to judge fit before paying.

Where the same complaints keep recurring

An equally substantial, more granular share of the review corpus pushes back hard on exactly the systems the positive reviews gloss over. The single most repeated complaint concerns enemy variety: multiple detailed reviews report fighting the same five to ten enemy types — a recurring roster of spiders, imps, cultists and a minotaur among them — across the entire game regardless of location or story progression, with one reviewer bluntly rating enemy diversity one out of ten despite recommending the game overall for its gunplay. Procedural dungeon generation draws a closely related complaint: several reviewers describe every "unique" dungeon as visibly assembled from the same small set of interchangeable modules, producing a veneer of variety that dissolves quickly under any sustained play. The RPG systems underneath the shooting draw their own detailed criticism, with the mage class's skill tree singled out by one reviewer as effectively four elemental abilities and minor, largely inconsequential passive upgrades, undercutting any sense of meaningful build customisation across the game's three classes.

Rough edges beyond the content itself

A separate, more technical thread of criticism concerns polish. UI readability draws specific, repeated complaints about small, non-scalable text that multiple reviewers doubt would be legible on Steam Deck or similar handhelds, and controller support, while functional, is reported as lacking any dedicated controller-facing interface, leaving players to work out button mappings largely by trial and error. One specific, oddly persistent bug draws its own dedicated complaints: several reviewers independently report a frame stutter triggered every time a lootable jar or container is struck, a small but constantly recurring interruption that more than one detailed review names as a direct contributor to requesting a refund. Taken together with reports of enemy AI that mostly charges directly at the player without meaningful tactical variation, the technical criticism paints a picture of a game that needed more time in testing and polish before launch, a point at least one detailed review makes explicitly, arguing the concept itself is sound but the execution suggests a rushed release.

A story that some reviewers say barely exists

A smaller but detailed thread of criticism concerns narrative ambition specifically. The game's own store description sets up a civil war between the Empire and the Order of the Second Sun, a dimming "Good Sun" and a Sunborn protagonist tasked with reversing the Empire's collapse, but several reviewers who otherwise praise the setting's premise report almost none of that lore actually surfacing during play. One detailed review argues the entire game's dialogue could fit on a single page, with no optional books, codex deep-dives or meaningful NPC variety to flesh out a setting that reviewer feels had genuine potential, describing every non-quest-giving NPC in the world as visually interchangeable aside from a name and a slightly different moustache. That complaint sits specifically alongside, not in place of, the game's real strength in moment-to-moment shooting: several of the same reviewers who criticise the story still recommend the game for its combat, treating narrative thinness as a separate and secondary shortfall rather than a dealbreaker on its own.

Value

At NZ$17.39, its price at the time of review, Second Sun sits at a level several reviewers explicitly describe as fair for what's on offer, provided expectations are calibrated correctly going in — this is consistently framed as a nostalgic, uncomplicated shooter-RPG rather than a polished, systems-deep modern looter, and reviewers who buy it on those terms report getting real value from a game that, in one reviewer's words, is "the best $20 I've spent on a game in a long time." The Mixed score — 91 positive against 40 negative across 131 reviews — reflects a review base that is genuinely divided rather than simply lukewarm, split fairly evenly between players who find real, specific charm in the game's lack of pretension and players whose more detailed critical reviews document real, repeated shortcomings in enemy variety, dungeon design and technical polish. For players specifically drawn to early-2000s shooter-RPG nostalgia and willing to overlook thin content variety, the demo is the right place to judge that fit directly; for players wanting the deep, varied looter-shooter systems the game's marketing gestures toward, the review corpus is honest that Second Sun doesn't fully deliver them yet. </content>