This is made by
MinMax Games, the dev team of two that made the original
SPAZ (I highly recommend it if you're a fan of the old style top-down space exploration / combat games).
The game is content complete, it's being released on the 19th May into Early Access for $20. Given how fun and well-made SPAZ was, plus the way this EA release is being managed (content complete with internal testing finished), I'll be picking the game up on release day. I like the fact that they've used funding from the previous game to avoid Kickstarter for a slew of good reasons (ethics of people paying for unfinished software, management of expectations during a long dev cycle, and the need to support paying customers conflicting with iterative game development). Especially since their EA release is a complete game, lacking only Mac support and Local Co-op multiplayer.
As to what the game is about — you fly a ship around a galaxy recovering from the previous zombie apocalypse. You play as a captain, one of 201 powerful individuals with access to their own motherships. The game revolves around these individuals and their actions in a procedurally generated sandbox; each captain has the ability to level up, upgrade their ship, amass an armada, join factions (and the player can create their own faction with enough political support), build and destroy star bases and effectively manipulate the campaign world.
Each ship is made up of an assortment of parts - random diablo-style drops that function as the game's loot
and it's economy. It's randomly generated, but bigger provinces and more dangerous ships manufacture or utilise better quality pieces. You slap pieces together to build your post-apocolayptic Mothership as you fly around the galaxy and stake your claim. I think the trade aspect of this is neato, since there're no arbitrary economic goods — everything bought and sold has a clear value and obvious meaning to the player. Because the player is a class of entity central to the game world (basically a Space Adventurer), they have huge economic and factional power, and can amass more as they band (or fight) the other NPC captains.
I'll update this once I know how it plays, but I wanted to post this up in case anyone else was interested in this kind of sandbox-style Star Control / Mount and Blade / ARPG'ish game.
(And to schild, it has random loot. Don't know if it's as good as D3's though).
LINKS:
Announcement trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuol96JX9W4Trailer with examples of the starmap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LndzqSjt2K8Release trailer (I didn't like this one as much):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYyoutubeTMIcSteam page:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/252470Website:
http://minmax-games.com/SpacePiratesAndZombies/
Author
